Cookies & Consent

To see Cookie and Consent information in your tracks, your Trackingplan Web SDK must be version 1.32.0 or greater. Please make sure you're up to date. For more info, here's how to update your SDK.

What is the Cookies & Consent Tab?

Modern websites often rely on Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) to obtain user consent before placing cookies or running tracking scripts. However, it can be hard to know:

If the CMP was properly loaded when a user landed
Whether the user gave consent for analytics or marketing
If tracking events were triggered before any consent was given

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Trackingplan helps you answer these questions by giving you visibility into the user's cookie consent status and associating this data with every track, helping you:

Understand which Consent Management Platform (CMP) was detected to identify how user consent is being handled on your site
Filter and analyze tracking events based on CMP status
Investigate what categories of cookies were consented to or whether tracking is happening without consent
Analyze the cookies present at the moment of the request

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This is especially helpful for debugging tracking behaviour, especially when your analytics, pixels, or tags depend on user consent. It also helps verify if your CMP is working as expected and whether your website is respecting users’ privacy choices.

How it works

Trackingplan's Web SDK automatically detects consent data from the most common CMPs by reading their cookies at the time of each request.

If a CMP is detected, Trackingplan extracts:

The CMP provider name (e.g., OneTrust, TrustArc, CookieBot)
The categories consented

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As each CMP defines its own category codes (e.g., OneTrust uses codes like CC0001, CC0002 , or CMPs using the EUConsent use numbers like EUConsent1, EUConsent2), Trackingplan keeps these original names so you can identify them based on your CMP configuration.

This consent data is then saved as attributions, meaning you can:

Filter your tracks based on consent information in any of your Trackingplan’s Reports.
Use Advanced Conditions to create custom queries (e.g., “show me only tracks where the analytics cookie was accepted”).

Cookies & Consent Tab in Trackingplan’s Tracks Explorer

Trackingplan’s Tracks Explorer gives you a full view of each track — including not only technical and behavioral data, but also the user’s consent status at the exact time the event was recorded.

By clicking on any track, you'll find a dedicated Cookies & Consent tab. This tab gives you complete visibility into what consent data (if any) was detected when that track was recorded, along with which cookies were present in the browser at that moment.

These are the 3 common consent scenarios you may encounter:

Case 1: Consent cookie detected, with accepted categories

This is the ideal and most common scenario when consent is properly managed.

Trackingplan detects the CMP present on your site and provides you with the following details:

CMP provider: That is the CMP detected on your site (OneTrust, CookieBot, TrustArc, etc.)
Consented categories: All the categories the user accepted

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Note that, for consent categories, Trackingplan will only show categories where consent has been explicitly granted.

This is because most CMPs don’t technically differentiate between categories that are rejected and those that haven’t been answered yet — meaning both appear the same in the cookie.

Therefore, to avoid confusion, Trackingplan will only display categories that were clearly accepted. That’s why, in the example below, if the user had only accepted the analytics cookie, that would be the only one visible, and the rest would not appear.

Cookie string: The raw string extracted from the browser’s cookies.
First-party cookies: As an additional layer of analysis, Trackingplan also shows the list of first-party cookies present at the time of each request.

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In this case, only cookie keys will be extracted, and never the values, to ensure both privacy and efficient payload handling.

This is helpful when analyzing if certain cookies are being placed even without user consent, as the presence of cookies and the accepted categories together can help you understand how cookies are behaving relative to user consent, one of the key aspects of CMP compliance.

Case 2: Consent cookie not found in this request, but found in other tracks

Sometimes, the CMP may not be ready when the first events are sent — either because the user hasn’t interacted with the cookie banner yet, or the CMP took time to load.

In these situations, Trackingplan’s Cookies & Consent tab will show the following message:

This means that Trackingplan has detected the consent cookie in other events from the same user/session, usually meaning that:

The user hadn’t accepted or rejected consent yet
The CMP wasn’t loaded in time for this event
The first track occurred before the user made a choice

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However, while other tracks do contain the cookie, so consent was likely given later, this scenario can also be useful for spotting timing issues in your CMP implementation.

Case 3: Consent cookie not found in this request, nor any other track

If Trackingplan can’t find a consent cookie in any of the tracks from your site or session, it will display the following message:

This could mean:

Your CMP isn’t correctly implemented.
It isn’t firing for the environment you’re testing (e.g., staging).
Or that your CMP is not currently supported by Trackingplan.

In this case, we recommend:

Check if your CMP is included in our list of supported CMPs.
Ensure your cookie banner is properly initialized.
Verify that no script or delay is blocking the CMP before page load.

Supported CMPs

Trackingplan supports the most popular Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) that either follow the EUConsent standard or use recognizable proprietary formats.

We currently support:

OneTrust
TrustArc
CookieBot
Usercentrics
Any other CMP that stores consent using the EUConsent cookie specification

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Are you using a different CMP and would like Trackingplan to support it? Feel free to contact us.

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