How Tailor honors visitor cookie consent

What consent controls

Your experiments and fully ramped pages are never gated by consent. They run for every visitor immediately, whether or not they have responded to your consent banner. What a visitor sees depends on how each page is set up: a fully ramped page shows to every visitor, while an experiment shows its variant to a share of visitors. Consent does not change what a visitor sees.

When a consent provider is configured, consent controls three things:

• Cookie. Whether Tailor stores a random ID in a cookie so we can keep the visitor pinned to the same variant across visits. This avoids the experience changing every time they come back.
• Analytics events. Whether Tailor tracks visitor engagement. These events are what make the visit count toward experiment results.
• Identification, optional. If visitor identification is enabled, whether Tailor identifies the visitor's company and role using their IP address. Without consent, the visitor is not identified.

Learn more about visitor identification

Loading the Tailor script before consent

Because your experiments and fully ramped pages do not depend on consent, you can load the Tailor script before consent is collected. You do not need to block or consent-gate the Tailor tag. The script loads and your pages run right away, but Tailor does not identify the visitor or record their engagement until that visitor grants consent through your consent provider. Consent is evaluated only when a consent provider (your consent management platform, or CMP) is configured for the domain in Tailor's settings.

Configure your consent provider

Configure each domain's consent provider in the dashboard:

For each domain, select the consent management platform it uses. Tailor reads consent from the following platforms:

• OneTrust
• Cookiebot
• Usercentrics
• CookieScript
• CookieYes
• HubSpot

No additional tags or snippets are required. If a domain has no consent provider configured, Tailor does not evaluate consent on that domain: your experiments and fully ramped pages still run, and identification and analytics follow the browser's standard cookie behavior. If your consent provider is not listed, contact us; we can add support for additional providers quickly on request.

How Tailor classifies consent

Tailor reads the consent categories recorded by your provider and treats consent to either analytics / performance cookies or marketing / advertising / targeting cookies as consent to identify the visitor and track their engagement. Each platform labels these categories differently, so Tailor maps each platform's categories to these two groups.

• Consent granted: Tailor identifies the visitor and tracks their engagement, and the visit counts toward your experiment results.
• Consent declined, not yet given, or unreadable: Tailor does not identify the visitor or track engagement, and the visit does not count. The visitor still sees your experiments and fully ramped pages.

When consent is unknown

Where a consent provider is configured and the consent state is absent or cannot be determined, Tailor does not identify the visitor or track engagement. Your experiments and fully ramped pages still run in every case. This applies when:

• The consent provider has not finished loading. Tailor waits until the consent state is available.
• The visitor has not yet responded to the consent banner. Tailor waits until consent is recorded.
• The consent state cannot be read or returns an error.
• A consent provider is configured for the domain, but its banner does not load. Tailor flags the condition for our team.

Region and country-specific behavior

Whether consent is required can differ by region. Your experiments and fully ramped pages are unaffected: they run for every visitor regardless of region. What changes is whether Tailor identifies the visitor and tracks engagement. When your provider indicates consent is not required for a visitor, Tailor identifies the visitor and tracks engagement; when consent is required, Tailor waits for the visitor's decision before doing either.

To apply different behavior in different countries, configure it in your consent provider, which is the source Tailor reads. For custom configuration options, contact us to discuss your requirements.

Responding to consent changes during a session

Tailor re-evaluates consent if it changes during a session. If a visitor grants consent after initially declining or ignoring the banner, Tailor begins identifying the visitor and tracking engagement from that point. If a visitor withdraws consent, Tailor stops. Your experiments and fully ramped pages are unaffected throughout. The change applies during the same session, without a page reload.

Effect on your reporting

• Every visitor sees your experiments and fully ramped pages, regardless of consent.
• Visits from consenting visitors are identified, tracked, and counted in your results.
• Visits from visitors who decline, have not responded, or whose consent cannot be read are not tracked, so they do not appear in your results.
• Before a visitor responds to the banner, the visit is not tracked, so no visitor is measured ahead of their decision.