Use Google Tag Manager

You are adding one template to your container, on one trigger. Nothing is pasted into your HTML and nothing is hosted by you. Choose a route puts this route beside the other one.

🚀 Four steps

1. Import the Consentio template into your container.

Download consentio-tag.tpl from the latest release. In Tag Manager go to Templates → Tag Templates → New, open the ⋮ menu at the top right, choose Import, pick the file and Save.

There is nothing to search for and nothing that tells you when a newer one exists. It is provided as it is: what you import is what your container runs until you import a newer file.

2. Make a tag from it, on the Consent Initialization trigger.

Use the built-in Consent Initialization - All Pages. Not All Pages — Consent Initialization. Tag Manager guarantees that trigger runs before every other trigger in the container, and that guarantee is the only reason the answer arrives in time.

3. Pick your files, if you have any. The tag has three pickers — Settings, Language, Cookie table — and every one of them can stay at its default, so you can publish first and come back. Left alone, that is a banner in English with the default behaviour and no cookie table.

Each picker takes the same file the HTML route fetches, as a Custom JavaScript variable — Variables → User-Defined → New → Custom JavaScript — whose whole value is the file wrapped in a function that returns it. Make one for your consentio-settings.json and pick it as the Settings, one for your consentio-cookies.json and pick it as the Cookie table. You do not have to write either by hand: the settings file page builds one from switches, and the catalogue builds a cookie table from ticked rows — Copy as Tag Manager variable on each is the whole value to paste. A Constant holding the file’s JSON text works too, but its field is one line, so a file of any size is unreadable in it. For the words, Language has three choices: leave it at Built-in English, pick A published language pack and choose the language, or pick From a variable and point it at a language pack you pasted. The Tag Manager tag lists every picker and the three ways a file can reach it.

4. Publish, then move everything else into the container, or mark it. Anything still pasted into a page and not marked is outside consent. On this route that clean-up is most of the work.

🌍 Words from a variable

For From a variable, paste the pack’s JSON text into a Constant — or make a Custom JavaScript variable whose whole value is the pack wrapped in a function — and pick it as the tag’s Language pack variable:

function () {
	return {
		"locale": "en",
		"name": "English",
		"texts": {
			"barTitle": "Cookies on this site"
		}
	};
}

Tag Manager language packs has every published pack in that shape, complete, with a copy button — and the three things about the variable that Tag Manager does not tell you.

🧩 What the template does

It reads the cookie and tells Tag Manager what the visitor allows, before anything else in your container runs; then it loads the banner and hands it your three files. It uses no script tag and fetches nothing of yours. The Tag Manager tag lists the pickers, the three language choices, what it does in order, and the permissions it asks for.

🍪 Both ways use the same cookie

Consentio stores the answer in one cookie, and the template reads and writes that same cookie by the same rules. So a visitor who answers on a page using the HTML route is remembered on a page using this one, and the other way round.

One thing has to match for that to hold: the version. On this route it is version in the settings file; on the other it is data-version on the script tag. Set them differently and the same visitor gets asked twice.

The cookie’s name is always consentio on this route — a Tag Manager template has to name the cookie it reads when it is published, so cookieName in the settings file is ignored here. If you changed the name on the other route, change it back before you run both.

How long it lasts and what it covers are settings too — cookieLifetime and shareAcrossSubdomains — and they behave as they do on the other route.

The cookie is the full description — what is in it, how long it lasts, and what it looks like when nobody has answered yet.

🔍 Checking it worked

Use Tag Assistant. Preview your container, load a page, and open the very first event in the list. The message about consent has to be there, and it has to be first — before any other tag in the container fires. Present but late is the same as absent.

What it tells Google walks through the screens.

There is also a page on this site with no script tag. It is for checking that both ways of installing agree about the same visitor — a mismatch there is silent, so it is worth looking for on purpose.