Setting up Google Ads, without the cookies

Dev Zone Web Development
,
1

Hello all,
I’ve been updating my personal website (https://stuart.page/), in order to try and attract some additional work, as things seem to have dried up quite a bit this year. This led me into the depths of trying to set up google ads for the first time.

I’m banging my head against a wall, trying to figure out how I can manually send Google the conversion data (just an event notification to say that the form was submitted) using some custom JS or PHP code, rather than their default google tag code snippet…

Selection_791
Selection_791933×358 32.7 KB

…which installs a cookie.

Selection_789
Selection_7891195×591 73.2 KB

It’s the cookies that are the fundamental issue, as I so dearly want to not have to be yet another site that has that gosh darn cookie banner popup that everyone immedately auto-closes out of reflex. I love having this at the bottom of my site:

Selection_788
Selection_7881290×494 18.9 KB

At the end of the day, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to pay Google to send people to my site, and I just tell Google if that visitor submitted the contact form. I don’t need to send any actual/real information in that contact form, so everything should be anonymous and the EU should be happy. All I really need to send Google is that the form got submitted, and if Google provided a session token variable in the url when the visitor went to my site, I could send that with the event notification so Google can know which advert/click resulted in success, so they could pay out to whomever hosted the advert etc.

Is what I’m asking for possible? It really feels like all the help documentation is geared towards just adding Google tag manager to the site, and setting up a cookie banner.

I had a quick look on the internet for quick suggestions for alternatives to Google ads, and people are pretty much saying that Google has a monopoly. I don’t have a facebook account, but I bet they act the exact same way as google (cookie tracking etc).

I may just have to get more creative (but I think my partner will kill me):

Selection_790

Any guidance or tips/tricks is much appreciated.

2

It doesn’t matter, your website is directing traffic from the client to a third party, allowing for the collection of the IP by someone the client didn’t give consent to, which is enough to violate the GDPR.

Here a webmaster fined for using Google Fonts domain directly in its pages, without asking the visitor for their consent to use Google’s services. Of course, this applies to any CDN.

Here the Swedish agency just rules GA incompatible with GDPR.

I know, it’s a maze, every country having citizens subject to GDPR is applying more or less the text, and there is many attempts to circumvent it.

You need a UX to ask for your user’s consent before you load GA scripts

3

You need a UX to ask for your user’s consent before you load GA scripts

My intention is to be GDPR compliant, by not doing anything that would even require a user’s consent. You raise a good point about the fonts. I had originally had them served from the server, and that slipped, so I fixed that this morning so they are not using a CDN anymore and loaded from the server.

I don’t wish to install Google Analytics, only to pay for Googl Adwords to direct users to my site. As you point out, the simple act of having the user’s computer send the information with Javascript would be an issue, but I see no reason why I couldn’t do this on the server side with PHP. Again, just to be clear. All i would need to send is that the form got filled in, and possibly a tracking code such as a UUID or random string. E.g. dfw5DFSD442. I realize I’m probably asking a bit much because Google is all about the tracking everything.

I’ll try and get stuck into this which talks about GA4 with PHP, which may be what I need. However, the first screenshot gives me serious doubts:

image
image872×548 163 KB

At this stage, I need to just see if google adwords will let me pay them to direct users to the site, and I manually figure out how to track visits myself, not sending anything to Google (or any 3rd party), but Google are probably not going to allow that as they probably need to know which clicks actually led to “conversions”.

4

That’s the problem, you can’t be compliant without collecting consent.