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Introduction
CookieWave is a consent management platform: a cookie banner your visitors see, plus the machinery behind it that keeps your analytics and advertising tags compliant.
What it does
- Shows a consent banner tuned per region — opt-in in the EEA/UK, opt-out where that is the standard — and records each decision as proof.
- Blocks or gates tags until the visitor consents, either automatically (mark a script with a category) or through your own code.
- Sends Consent Mode signals to Google tags, Microsoft UET and Microsoft Clarity, so those tools adjust their own behaviour to the visitor's choice.
- Honours Global Privacy Control, the universal opt-out required by a growing number of US state laws.
- Runs an IAB TCF 2.3 CMP for publishers who monetise with programmatic advertising (Google AdSense / Ad Manager / AdMob).
Two ways tags respect consent
Throughout these docs you will see two distinct models. It helps to know the difference up front, because most other CMPs blur them.
Script gating — the tag does not run at all until the visitor consents. Best when a tag has no consent awareness of its own. CookieWave does this two ways: marking the script with a category, or listening for a consent event from your own code.
Consent Mode — the tag runs immediately but receives a signal (ad_storage, analytics_storage, …) telling it what it may do. It then operates fully or in a cookieless/limited mode. This is Google's and Microsoft's own recommended approach, and CookieWave sends the real signals — Google, Microsoft UET, Microsoft Clarity — from a single toggle, no code required.
For most sites, Consent Mode is the simpler and more capable choice: your tags keep measuring conversions cookielessly even when a visitor declines, instead of going dark.