# Consent is blocking data

You turned on the consent banner and the next day users and page views fell off a step. That is the product working as designed, not a fault: under opt-in, nothing is collected until the visitor chooses. Here is how to confirm it and what your real options are.

## Look at the shape of the drop

A drop caused by consent has a recognisable shape, distinct from a drop caused by a broken tag:

- **It is a step, not a slope.** It starts on the day you published the module and then holds at the new level.
- **It takes every metric down together.** Users, sessions, page views, events, browser-side revenue — all by the same proportion. If only one report fell, the cause is elsewhere.
- **Server-side events are untouched.** Orders posted from your backend or a CRM module never pass through the browser path, so consent does not gate them. If event counts fell while recorded orders held steady, that is a very strong signal.
- **Heatmaps go empty at the same time.** Heatmap capture sits under the same Statistics category.

## Why it happens: opt-in fails closed

AdPix is the tag itself, so it enforces consent at the source: before any page view, any event and any cookie, the tracker asks itself whether that category is currently allowed.

"Unresolved" means any state in which no valid choice exists — the banner has not appeared yet, the visitor has not answered, their choice has expired, or it does not match the current revision number. What happens in that state depends on **Default mode**:

| Mode | Unresolved means |
| --- | --- |
| Opt-in — EU/EEA | the same as a rejection. Nothing non-essential runs. |
| Opt-out — rest of world | the same as an acceptance. Everything runs until the visitor rejects. |

So under opt-in, a visitor who sees the banner and closes the page without deciding **is not in your reports at all** — not as a user, not as a page view. That is deliberate: any other behaviour means collecting data before consent.

> **Two of these gates used to fail open**
>
> In the module's first versions, the durable visitor ID and heatmap capture worked even without Statistics consent. Both are closed now. If you recently updated the tag and turned on the banner at the same time, part of the drop you are seeing comes from that correction — and the earlier number was not a correct one.

## Confirm that consent is really the cause

Go to **Cookie consent → Consent log** and set the date range to the range the drop falls in.

1. Read **Consent prompts**. If it is near zero while you have traffic, the banner is not reaching visitors or the record is not being written — jump to "If the drop doesn't line up with consent".
2. Read **Reject non-essential**: the share of records where only Necessary was accepted. That is the lower bound on the data you are losing.
3. Open the **Category opt-in rate** chart. The figure for Statistics is roughly the share you are still measuring; the gap between Statistics and Marketing tells you how incomplete your campaign attribution will be.
4. Weigh the drop against those numbers. If your drop runs in the same direction as "Reject non-essential" but is larger, the difference is the people who left without deciding — they create no record and appear in none of these charts.

Look at **Consent actions over time** as well: a wave of withdrawals after a banner change shows up there.

## What each category gates

| Category | What is lost when it is rejected |
| --- | --- |
| Statistics | page views, custom events, browser-side e-commerce, user identification, the anonymous ID and session cookies, heatmaps. Effectively all measurement. |
| Marketing | first- and last-touch cookies, cross-domain ID handoff, fingerprint enrichment. Events still arrive, but their attribution is weaker. |
| Preferences | AdPix ties no behaviour to it. |
| Necessary | cannot be rejected. |

The practical consequence: rejecting Statistics means the visitor is not counted at all; rejecting Marketing means they are counted but will probably land under "(direct)". If your loss is not in traffic volume but in attribution quality, the culprit is Marketing, not Statistics. The full breakdown is in [Consent enforcement in the tracker](analytics/privacy/consent-categories-and-gating).

## Three real options

Once you have confirmed it, there are three things you can do, and only three.

**One — pick the right mode.** **Default mode** lives under **Cookie consent → Consent settings**. Opt-out is only legitimate when your audience is not covered by EU law. Note that the hint under that field says the mode is set dynamically by visitor region; it is not today — the mode you pick applies to every visitor. If you have European traffic, set opt-in for everyone and accept the drop.

**Two — show fewer categories.** You do not have to display all four. If no marketing cookie is set on your site, switch that category off in the **Categories** card; the banner gets simpler, and a visitor wary of "Marketing" accepts "Statistics" more readily.

**Three — raise the acceptance rate.** This is where the return is, and all of it lives in the **Builder** tab:

- set **Consent banner layout** and **Position** so the banner is readable and does not sit on top of your content;
- set **Button weighting** to **Primary** so the accept button is actually visible;
- write **Title** and **Description** in your own words. The defaults work, but copy that says what the data is used for works better;
- match **Locale** to your site's language;
- **Dim background** forces a decision sooner and shrinks the undecided group — at the cost of a heavier experience. Measure its effect on **Accept-all rate** rather than guessing.

Every banner change is saved with **Publish** and reaches live visitors within about a minute. The full build path is in [Set up the consent banner](analytics/privacy/consent-cmp-setup).

> **Do not switch the banner off to recover numbers**
>
> Turning the module off raises the numbers, but it does not "recover" any data — it collects data the visitor never agreed to. If you have EU visitors, that is a legal risk, not a technical choice. A smaller correct number beats a larger indefensible one; and because every event row carries the categories accepted at the time, you can always show what consent your data was collected under.

## If the drop doesn't line up with consent

If **Consent prompts** is near zero, or the drop is far larger than the rejection rate, check these four:

- **Did you raise the Revision number?** Every stored choice with a lower number counts as stale, and the unresolved rule applies until the visitor chooses again. Under opt-in that means a temporary drop plus a wave of new records — visible in the actions chart.
- **Is Consent expiry (days) set very short?** An expired choice is also unresolved.
- **Is the tag served through Tag Gateway?** The `/consent.js`, `/consent/config` and `/consent/record` paths must be in the proxy's allowlist, or the banner never loads and no record is written. See [Tag Gateway](analytics/collect/tag-gateway).
- **Did the drop coincide with a release on your own site?** Then it is probably not consent at all. Go to [No data is arriving](analytics/troubleshooting/no-data-arriving).

## What consent does not do to past data

Withdrawing consent stops collection from that moment and clears that category's cookies, but it does not delete what was already recorded. If a visitor wants their data removed, that is a separate path: [Erasure requests](analytics/privacy/erasure-requests).

## Frequently asked questions

### How much data will I lose?

As much as the share of visitors who do not accept Statistics. The "Category opt-in rate" chart on the Consent log tab gives you that figure. Under opt-in, a visitor who sees the banner and leaves without deciding belongs to the same group — and that person has no record at all in the consent log.

### Can I switch the banner off to get my numbers back?

Technically yes, but that does not "get data back"; it collects data the visitor never agreed to. If you have EU visitors, opt-in is a legal requirement. The right move is to raise the acceptance rate, not to remove the gate.

### Does the page view get lost when the visitor accepts?

No. After saving the choice, the banner fires an event on the page and the tracker sends the page view right then. No reload is needed, and a page view is not sent twice for the same URL.

### My drop doesn't line up with the acceptance rate. Where else should I look?

If the consent log is nearly empty while the drop is real, the consent endpoints usually are not reaching the collector — for example a Tag Gateway that does not proxy the `/consent/*` paths. And if you raised the Revision number, every stored choice went stale, so the unresolved rule applies until each visitor chooses again.

## Related

- [How consent is enforced in the tracker](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/privacy/consent-categories-and-gating/)
- [Set up the consent banner](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/privacy/consent-cmp-setup/)
- [The consent log and export](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/privacy/consent-log-and-export/)
- [Consent categories](https://docs.adpix.io/en/concepts/governance/consent-categories/)

---

[Docs](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/troubleshooting/consent-is-blocking-data/) · AdPix