Google has a long history of taking a user-first approach in everything we do. As a part of our commitment to users, we never sell personal information and give users transparency and control over their ad experiences via tools like My Account, Why this Ad, and Mute this Ad. We also invest in initiatives such as the Coalition for Better Ads, the Digital News Initiative, the Google News Initiative and ads.txt in order to support a healthy, sustainable ads ecosystem and help you, our publishers, grow.
As part of this effort, we’ve developed an integrated Privacy & messaging tool to help you manage privacy choices and monetize your content. Use the controls on the Privacy & messaging page to manage the settings for various privacy regulations. Optionally, use the messaging features to create and manage the messages you use to obtain consent from your users. Draft new messages, display them to users, and measure user engagement to understand how users are interacting with the consent messages you've created.
Use Privacy & messaging to create user messages—messages you create and display to users on your site or app. User messages present users with information about your request and different choices depending on the message type and settings you’ve selected. Privacy & messaging can help you communicate with users to gather consent or opt-out requests, as required by regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and US state privacy laws, or recover lost revenue from ad blocking users.
This article will help you understand the tools available in Privacy & messaging.
Get started
Sign in to your Ad Manager account and click Privacy & messaging in the Ad Manager sidebar.
Settings
Use the settings in Privacy & messaging to manage account-level privacy and message settings:
- Privacy regulations settings: On the "Settings" tab for each privacy regulation, you can manage the account-level settings related to that specific regulation, including the types of ads you want to serve and the ad partners you want to use. These settings were previously located on other pages in your account.
- Message settings: You can also manage account-level message settings on the "Settings" tab if you have chosen to use Privacy & messaging to create and manage user messages. The first time you create a new message for a particular message type, you may be asked to review key account settings.
To access and adjust message settings, click Privacy & messaging, then click on one of the message type cards.
Learn more about the message settings available in Privacy & messaging:
Messages
The messages list displays the draft and published messages you’ve created. It includes their current status, how many sites and apps they’re associated with, and the languages in which they’re available. Draft new messages, display them to users, and measure user engagement with the messages you’re currently displaying.
To access the messages list, click Privacy & messaging. Click Manage on one of the message type cards on the Privacy & messaging page.
Supported languages
You can create messages in a variety of languages. The language your message is displayed in is determined at serving based on the language setting on the user’s device.
English (US)
Spanish
Spanish (Latin America)
Languages supported for IDFA messages
Bangla
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (UK)
English (US)
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Marathi
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Romanian
Russian
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Spanish (Latin America)
Swedish
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Arabic
Bangla
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (UK)
English (US)
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
German (Switzerland)
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Marathi
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Romanian
Russian
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Spanish (Latin America)
Swedish
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Arabic
Bangla
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (UK)
English (US)
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
German (Switzerland)
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Marathi
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Romanian
Russian
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Spanish (Latin America)
Swedish
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Test your messages
Apps: For European regulations messages, use the Google User Messaging Platform (UMP) SDK to test your app's behavior as though the device was located in the EEA or UK. Learn more about geographical testing for the UMP SDK on Google Developers.
Sites: Test a message by appending the testing parameters to the URL of a site tagged to display messages using a Google Publisher Tags (GPT) ad tag. To test a message:
Site message testing instructions and parameters
- Publish one or more messages to your site pages.
- Navigate to the site page on which you want to test the message.
- In your browser’s address bar, append the query parameters to the page URL:
| Parameter | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
?fc=alwaysshow |
Displays the published message. Ignores region. |
http://example.com/ |
?fc=alwaysshow& |
Displays the European regulations message that is currently published for your site. Ignores region. |
http://example.com/ |
?fc=alwaysshow& |
Displays the US state regulations message that is currently published for your site. Ignores region. |
http://example.com/ |
?fc=alwaysshow& |
Displays the ad blocking recovery message that is currently published for your site. Ignores ad block detection. |
http://example.com/ |
?fc=alwaysshow& |
Displays the Offerwall message that is currently published for your site. Note that this only works if there is nothing preventing the Offerwall from showing such as an active page exclusion. Find more details in the Offerwall troubleshooting guide. |
http://example.com/ |
When testing your messages, keep the following in mind:
- The purpose of the query parameters is to preview the “look and feel” of the message as displayed on the selected site page. For example, after viewing a message on your site’s page, you may decide to go back and make changes to the colors, fonts, or language of the message.
- In order for the query parameter to display the message, the message you're testing needs to be published to your site and the GPT ad tag needs to be located on the page.
- We suggest testing the message in a browser that clears cookies, such as Chrome in incognito mode.
- Use
?fc=alwaysshowif only one type of user message is published for your site. Use the other testing parameters if you want to test a specific type of message.
Reporting
You can use the Privacy & messaging report in Ad Manager to report on the full range of available metrics.
Privacy & messaging API
The Privacy & messaging API provides a library to interact with the Google consent management tool. The API has general functionality, but also functionality specific to consent gathering. It can:
- Suppress the Google consent management message for any given user
- Query the ad blocking status of a user
- Allow a user to revoke consent (if applicable)
