Podcast Olivier Chouraki Consent Manager
In today’s world, consent is really important especially with the GDPR requirements. If your company is active online, doing business, even with a simple website or blog, you should make sure your activities are in line with the legislation.
My guest today in this episode is Olivier Chouraki, President of Consent Manager. He agreed to talk about cookies, GDPR obligations and other concepts linked to a good consent policy.
You can enjoy and read a little summary below or just listen to the podcast on the following link or one of your favorite platforms:
Consent what do we mean by this?
“That’s a very good question! Do you still see very small « cookie banners » saying « if you continue browsing this website you accept everything » and you can only click « OK »? This is not consent. Consent is very well defined now:
- It needs to be well informed, you need to know exactly who is doing what with your data
- It needs to be active and explicit: you need to click on a button knowing what you do
- It needs to be free: it means you should be able to accept Google Analytics but not Google Ads for example.
That’s what we mean by consent now.”
Are many companies today still clueless about GDPR?
“Unfortunately, many companies still have non GDPR-compliant websites. For example, they tell you about cookies, they ask for your consent, but if you don’t give it they still create cookies!”
What are the risks for a company to ignore the consenting rules?
“Basically, you risk fines and you risk to look bad.
Fines could be quite high, up to 2% of your turnover, but so far we have seen mostly big companies get big fines, and you would probably get a warning before the actual fine. But you can get complaints from users. And it looks bad. You don’t want to see your company name in a list of non-compliant websites or to get a low score from littlesyster or other privacy labels. Also your visitors see that you are not up to date, or you don’t care much about their privacy, maybe you even sell their data. So you risk to lose their trust. And your competitors can also use this against you.
It’s not a good idea to ignore or resist GDPR. It’s the law and at some point you will have to comply.”
Is getting consent complicated for a website owner with an international audience?
“It’s a bit more complicated but it’s still relatively simple. You have to comply with GDPR for your European visitors, CCPA for Californian visitors, PIPEDA for Canadians, and so on. And of course you have to support multiple languages.”
Are all companies facing the same type of regulations and constraints, or do certain sectors or industries need to be more careful than others?
“All companies and individuals are facing the same regulations and constraints, but bigger companies probably face a higher risk of fines. And publishers and online stores need to be very careful not to hurt their business when they make their websites compliant.
If you earn advertising revenue, you need a very high consent rate. If you sell online you need to watch your bounce rate. If you buy traffic you need to measure the performance of your campaigns. You also probably want to understand your traffic and your audience and to have a good-looking website.”
Is it difficult to implement a consent policy?
“It depends.
For a corporate website of a small company, we can setup your consent management in one hour, if you already have your Privacy Policy page.
If you have online sales or advertising revenue, it usually takes a few weeks to set up something that is compliant and doesn’t hurt your business.
If you are a large company with dozens of websites and players involved, your DPO, legal, IT, security, marketing, your web agency, then it could take a few months to set up the required meetings, involve everyone, take decisions, do the setup, integration and testing.”
What kind of timeline are we looking at when implementing or getting compliant with regulations? Does it require a lot of coding or programming skills for companies who want one?
“No, in most cases. Most customers just install our Wordpress plugin or another module, and don’t need any coding at all. A few customers have special requirements. For example, they use CSS to customize the consent window, or they want to integrate age verification in the consent window, or a subscription offer. Or they have hundreds of cookies and requests to external domains from their websites and some will need a specific blocking or unblocking process. “
How about the cost?
“Our solution costs between 19 and 700 € per month. There are more expensive solutions that can cost the double for the same features. And there are cheaper solutions costing a few euros per month that can work for very simple and small websites. I would advise not to use a free solution because they usually collect and sell your visitors’ data, which is exactly what you don’t want to do.”
Does getting consent and all the cookies’ policies etc. affect a customer’s journey? especially in e-commerce?
“Yes. Many visitors are fed up of giving their consent to each website they visit. If your consent window is too big, too aggressive, they sometimes prefer to leave the website, and you will see your bounce rate increase and your online sales drop. There is often a tradeoff between a high consent rate and a low bounce rate. For e-commerce website we usually prioritize the low bounce rate and optimize it by trying multiple consent windows with automated A/B testing.”
Can getting consent be a source of frustrations for website visitors?
“Yes, it is frustrating for visitors to see these cookies windows. But if you do it really well, if you find the right wording and the right design, you can actually give your visitors a positive experience, you can show that you value them, you treat them well. Humor and respect usually work well. Then you can get a very high consent rate and a very low bounce rate.”
What would be your advice for the audience? (check their website? make an audit ?…)
- Test the compliance of your website. We have a free tool for this on consentmanager.fr. It’s free and it will take less than 5 minutes.
- Look at what your competitors are doing, and do it better.
- Use a Consent Management Platform, a CMP. It’s what we do all day. We are here to help.
- Talk to your lawyer or your DPO or your agency about it. They should be able to help you.
For those who wish to learn more about Consent Manager : https://www.consentmanager.fr/?utm_source=20cent
If you wish to test your website thanks to the free analysis of Consent Manager just check out: https://www.consentmanager.fr/analyseur-de-cookies/?utm_source=20cent
PodcastOlivier ChourakiConsent Consent Management CmpCookieDigitalEcommerce