SELLWISE INSIGHTS
Consent banners do not stop tags. Your tag setup does.
What GA4, Tag Manager and Meta Pixel should do before a visitor chooses, what valid consent looks like and how to verify it.
A banner records a choice; tags must respect it
A cookie banner only collects a decision. Whether GA4, Google Tag Manager or Meta Pixel sends data depends on how the tags are wired to that decision. Google states that the site owner remains responsible for obtaining consent; consent mode is how the choice is passed to Google tags.
Google documents two setups. In basic consent mode, Google tags do not load until the visitor interacts with the banner, and nothing is sent before a choice. In advanced consent mode, tags load with default states, usually denied, and send cookieless pings that Google uses for modeling. Meta Pixel offers a similar switch: fbq('consent', 'revoke') pauses sending, and fbq('consent', 'grant') resumes it after consent.
What counts as consent
The European Data Protection Board is explicit. Pre-ticked boxes are invalid, and silence or simply continuing to use a service is not an active choice. Scrolling or swiping through a page will not under any circumstances count as a clear affirmative action. Withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it.
In practice that means separate choices for analytics and marketing, a reject option as visible as accept, and a way to change the decision later that actually stops the tags.
Verify it in the browser, not in the settings screen
Open the site in a private window with the network panel visible. Before any choice, you should see no requests to Google Analytics or Meta, or only the cookieless pings you deliberately accepted with advanced mode. Accept analytics only and confirm that marketing tags stay silent. Then withdraw consent and check that sending stops on the next page.
Repeat this after every tag or banner change. A configuration that looked right in Tag Manager can still fire too early because one trigger was not tied to consent.