Table of Contents

Microsoft Universal Event Tracking (UET) Consent Mode

UET Consent Mode allows you to customize UET cookie access based on user consent preferences. This feature enhances UET’s privacy capabilities, giving you control over whether to store first-party and third-party cookies.

In the context of UET Consent Mode, first-party cookies are generated by your website’s domain (the advertiser), while third-party cookies are created by Microsoft Advertising (e.g., Bing.com).

How It Works

Consent mode is set via a property in UET called ad_storage. The possible values for ad_storage are:

Value for `ad_storage`	Description
Granted	First and third-party cookies may be read and written for UET. If no default is set, UET uses granted by default.
Denied	First-party cookies are not read nor written for UET. Third-party cookies are not written. Third-party cookies are read-only for fraud and spam purposes—not for advertising purposes.

In European Economic Area countries, along with the UK and Switzerland, Microsoft Advertising is gradually enforcing consent mode. This will lead to conversion loss if the granted signal is not passed to UET when a user accepts consent. In scenarios where consent mode is enforced, the default value is denied.

For most countries, if the consent setting is not set, UET uses granted by default.

Set Up Microsoft Consent Mode with iubenda Privacy Controls and Cookie Solution

iubenda Privacy Controls and Cookie solution provide built-in out-of-the-box support for UET consent mode, both using Autoblocking or having the iubenda.com/sync snippet in your configuration available in all the recent integration codes.

If your code is provided with one of the two snippets, you don’t have to do any additional steps: Autoblocking or sync snippet will take care of setting automatically the default state (ad_storage to denied) and send the update signal as soon as the user updates their preferences via the existing global window.uetq property.

In order to make everything work smoothly, make sure you list the “Microsoft Advertising” service in your Privacy and Cookie Policy.

If you already use iubenda for your legal documents and cookie banner, you need to add the “Microsoft Advertising” service from the Privacy and Cookie Policy Generator. Once added, the update will be automatically synced with your cookie banner, and our Privacy Controls and Cookie Solution will assign the right purpose to the new service. No need to do it manually!
If, instead, you use a custom document, make sure your cookie banner manages the Marketing purpose (5) and list “Microsoft Advertising” under this purpose.

And you’re done!

Validating Consent Mode Implementation with UET Tag Helper Browser Plugin

To verify the implementation of Consent Mode within UET you can:

Check in the browser console the value of window.uetq before and after the consent is granted or denied by the user.
Use the UET Tag Helper available for Edge and Chrome.

Enable UET Consent Mode Support with iubenda

Still have questions?

Attend one of our free webinars Email us Live chat

Documentation