We are living in an era where personal information of an individual is no more a secret if he is a regular user of the internet. The websites we visit leaves trackers and cookies in our system that records the user behavior even when we are not on the site anymore.
The data that is being collected by these trackers is used to determine the interests of the user and the way he uses the internet so that the companies can target the user if he is a consumer of the product they sell, in simple language, it is termed as personalized ads which no one entertains in this digital era. Keeping all of this in mind, the European Union (EU) came up with General Data Protection Regulation which was implemented on 25th May 2018 and should be followed by the companies, organizations and websites that have users from the European countries.
There should be a banner on your site which should be visible to the user who is visiting for the first time, stating that you will be collecting the user data for your own purposes. This may sound a bit more technical and off-topic if you haven’t used any Cookie plugin on your site and you are receiving traffic from European countries, we recommend you to try out Cookiebot. For those who have heard about this cookie service for the first time should stick with our cookiebot review and start using it on their site right after.
In this article, we will be diving into the plethora of features offered by Cookiebot, what cookie consent means, how you obtain it lawfully and how you can use Cookiebot’s GDPR cookie consent plugin on your website. That sounds amazing, right? Let’s straightaway jump to the next section of this article.
Cookiebot – An Overview of the Service
Cookiebot is self-serve cloud service cookie tool developed by Cybot which aims to provide the companies a simple yet effective solution to make it easy for the users to understand about cookies. It is a cookie and online tracking consent solution that adheres by the regulations of EU digital privacy direction 2009/136/EC and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
As per the guidelines of the law, the website must provide the visitor a brief understanding of what happens upon storing cookies and collecting the user data. The website must let the user know about:
- The details of your cookies
- The user agreement on storing the cookies on its system
- An option to opt out of cookies
- An option to change the decision
All of this can be easily managed by Cookiebot, therefore you don’t have to worry about the cookies and the changes made in the GDPR guidelines. All you need to do is create an account and get started which we will be discussing later on. For now, let us have a look at the features offered by Cookiebot.
Features of Cookiebot
The foremost function of Cookiebot is to find out the cookies in your website and restrict them unless the user agrees to let them store in its system. Other than this, Cookiebot offers a lot of features, we have listed down some of them below.
1. Automatic Cookie Scan & Declaration
The Cookiebot scans the site every month for HTTP/Javascript cookies, HTML5 Local Storage, Flash Local Shared Object, Silverlight Isolated Storage, IndexedDB, ultrasound beacons, pixel tags and gives an overview of every cookie declaration that is found on your website during the scan.
Also, you can add the cookie declaration on your website by adding a Javascript code in the header section automatically and manually. The cookie declaration is shown on every page of your site and this can also be customized which will be discussed later in this article. Every month, Cookiebot performs a complete scan of the cookies on your website and a detailed report is generated in the cookies section.
2. Cookie Consent Banner
The best thing about Cookiebot’s consent banner is that it is not ugly and can be customized as per your requirements. All you need to do is login to your Cookiebot account > Settings > Dialog. You can now change the placement and other settings easily, also the content of the banner can also be changed from the content section.
You can add the code on the entire website or just one page, whatever you prefer. There’s also no need to install any plugin, just paste a small script in the head section of your site.
3. Cookie Control & JavaScript SDK
Another amazing feature of Cookiebot is that it gives you a control over the cookies on your website. Your visitor doesn’t have to go through the list of cookies on your site and select which one should it agree to. Cookiebot puts each cookie under the suitable categories such as preferences, statistics, marketing and necessary and the user can select and deselect the cookies he doesn’t want to agree to.
The cookie is stored in the user’s browser in JSON-formatted value that are readable from the server side evaluating the user’s consent before even setting up the cookies. You can also monitor on which URL the cookie was first discovered making it easier to find out scripts setting cookies.
4. Bulk Domain Support
If your website has various subdomains, Cookiebot can let your visitors know about this and let them take decision that covers every domain/subdomain linked to your primary domain. Enabling this feature won’t trouble the user every time he refreshes a page or visits a subdomain of the site.
5. Fast, reliable & Secure
Cookiebot is a cloud-based service and works according to your requirements providing extensive features such as full redundancy, load balancing, automatic capacity scaling, continuous data backup and geo-replication. Secondly, the user consent is collected via secured SSL connection and are stored using encrypted keys, so you don’t have to worry about anything.
6. Easy Setup
Deploying cookiebot on a website is easy and hassle free as you just have to copy a few lines of code and insert it in the <head> section of your website and the cookie banner will be visible to the new visitors. It is a platform independent service that can be used on any type of website.
7. Supports all type of browsers
The script works on both HTML4 and HTML5 compliant browsers that supports JavaScript and Secure Socket Layer. Cookiebot is works flawlessly with the latest versions of the top six web browsers namely Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.
Pricing
The features offered by Cookiebot are really useful and helps you in setting up a cookie policy easily. You can choose a free plan with some limitations or a paid plan with unlimited domains and no restrictions.
The pricing chart gives a clear information about the pricing of Cookiebot. You can try out the free plan on your website before purchasing a plan and see if it suits your requirements. To help you to get started with cookiebot, we are listing down the instructions to create an account and setting up cookiebot on your website.
Registration & Installation Guide
In this section of the article, we are writing down a detailed guide on registering an account on Cookiebot and setting.
- The first step is to head over to Cookiebot signup page and fill up the necessary fields.
- Once done, a registration key will be sent to your email, you need to paste it in the registration key field which will show up in the next page after signing up.
- You now have to add the domain of your website and let cookiebot start the scanning process. It will take up to 24 hours for cookiebot to completely scan your website for cookies and trackers.
1. Setting Up the Cookie Consent Banner
In this section you will learn how to setup the cookie consent banner that will be displayed on your website.
- Click on “Dialog” option from the settings menu.
- In the first option, I.e., template settings choose where you want the cookie banner to be placed on your site. We recommend you to choose “bottom” placement as it is commonly used by websites.
- Now select the method, where you have two options namely Active consent and Explicit consent. An overview of each consent is explained in the option, we leave this choice on you.
- In the other consent, you will find two options, Page refresh and Page scroll where user will automatically give consent upon scrolling down the website or refreshing it. Choose the one that you wish to.
- The next option is “type” where you have to choose if the user has option to reject, accept only, reject only, and various other options. You have to select this on the basis of your website. Now on the left panel, preview the settings and make sure you save it.
- The other options are not available for us as we are on the free plan right now.
2. Adding the script on your website
In this step, you will learn how to add the script on your website. To do so, here is what you need to do:
- Go to the “your scripts” section and copy the script.
- If you are using WordPress CMS, you can install a plugin called “Header and footer scripts” and paste the code in the header section from there.
- The second option is to edit the theme of your site and place the code in-between <head> </head>.
- Save the settings and clear the cache of your site.
- That’s all you need to do to set up the declaration notice on your site.
Is Cookiebot Worth it?
It has become necessary to show a cookie declaration on your website if it has visitors from European countries. Various cookie plugins that you might have used on your site earlier are hardly of any use. Cookiebot does a complete scan of the cookies and trackers on your website and provides an overview of every cookie.
It is a cloud-based service and can be setup on a website without any hassle (you can follow the instructions above to setup on yours).
If you own only one site, you can try the free plan as it is more than enough for basic requirements. If you run a web development agency or own a bunch of websites, consider purchasing a plan which is quite expensive. The premium plan also unlocks various features and let you create different domain groups to manage websites easily.
Wrap Up
So, this was our review of the best cookie plugin out there that will manage the cookie policy on your website easily. Cookiebot is a cloud-based service which is platform independent and doesn’t require you to install plugin in your CMS, a small script is enough to do the job. In this article, we discussed the features of Cookiebot and shared the necessary steps to deploy it on a website.
