How to Test Consent Banner Configuration & Behavior

Testing your consent banner ensures that consent behavior aligns with your regional requirements and your intended technical implementation. This article outlines recommended steps for validating banner behavior and common areas to verify.

Start by confirming how your banner behaves on first page load, before any user interaction occurs.

Check whether your banner is configured as:

• Opt-in, where no non-essential activity occurs until consent is granted

• Opt-out, where non-essential activity is allowed until the user rejects or adjusts preferences

To test:

• Open a private or incognito browser session

• Load your site for the first time

• Observe the consent banner toggles to ensure the intended categories are enabled or disabled by default

• Confirm the behavior by opening browser developer tools and reviewing stored cookies (Application > Cookies)

Default behavior should align with your regional compliance strategy and internal policy decisions.

Reminder: Test Regional Variations

Consent behavior may vary by user location depending on your configuration. For example, you may apply an opt-in model for EU-based traffic and an opt-out model elsewhere.

To validate regional behavior:

• Use a VPN to simulate traffic from different regions

• Clear browser storage or use a fresh private session between tests

• Load the site and observe banner default settings and browser cookie behavior

Confirm that regions requiring opt-in consent display the appropriate defaults, and that regions with different requirements behave as expected.

When a user rejects non-essential categories, cookies may still exist in the browser but should be nullified or otherwise rendered inactive, depending on configuration.

To test:

• Allow cookies to be set, either by default or via manual opt-in

• Reload the page and confirm cookies exist

• Modify banner preferences to reject or disable non-essential categories

• Recheck cookies in browser developer tools

Confirm that non-essential cookies have their values removed, overwritten, or otherwise disabled in accordance with your configuration.

Note that the presence of a cookie name alone does not necessarily indicate active data collection. Focus on whether the cookie retains a meaningful value.

If Global Privacy Control (GPC) is enabled in the browser, your site should respect the signal in accordance with your configuration.

To test:

• Enable GPC in a supported browser or with the Captain Compliance GPC Extension for Chrome.

• Open a new private browsing session

• Load your site

Confirm that the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information option is activated and that the Targeting category is disabled. Verify that these banner settings are actually enforced by reviewing cookies in browser developer tools.

Consent banners control consent state, but script blocking behavior depends on how scripts are deployed.

Important considerations:

• Scripts loaded through Google Tag Manager must be explicitly gated using consent conditions

• Hard-coded or inline scripts must be manually wrapped with consent-aware logic

• Cookie blocking alone does not prevent all network requests

To validate:

• Reject non-essential categories

• Open browser developer tools and monitor the Network tab

• Confirm that non-essential third-party requests do not execute unless consent is granted

If scripts continue to fire after Reject, additional configuration may be required in GTM or via manual execution gating.

1. Always test in private or incognito sessions

2. Clear caches and browser storage between tests

3. Avoid testing while logged in unless explicitly required

4. Test both first-load and post-consent scenarios