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Cookie Banner.
A cookie banner is the notice and consent window a website uses to inform visitors about the cookies and tracking it uses and — depending on the legal situation — to obtain their consent. Technically, it controls which analytics and advertising scripts may be loaded at all.
Cookie Banner — Explained in Detail
Cookies are small files that a website stores in the browser. Strictly necessary cookies, for example for a shopping basket or a login, are unproblematic. Analytics and marketing cookies, on the other hand, record behaviour across visits and pass data on to third parties such as Google or Meta. For this category, data protection rules require transparency and, depending on where visitors come from, prior consent. The cookie banner is the tool used to ask for this decision and implement it technically.
The legal situation differs. In Switzerland, cookies are governed by Art. 45c of the Telecommunications Act (FMG): visitors must be informed about the processing and its purpose and told how they can refuse it. The revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP/DSG), in force since 1 September 2023, additionally requires transparency about the processing of personal data. Swiss law does not have a general opt-in requirement for cookies. For visitors from the EU, the GDPR and ePrivacy rules apply, with prior consent. Because many Swiss websites also have visitors from Germany or Austria, in practice they use a banner with a genuine choice. This is a general overview, not legal advice.
For advertisers there is an additional technical obligation: for users in the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Google requires the consent decision to be passed on via Consent Mode if data is to be used for personalised advertising and remarketing. Without this, audience and conversion features are lost. So the banner must not only look good but also be correctly connected to Google Tag Manager.
Every banner costs data: some visitors decline, and those visits are missing from the statistics. A banner that hides the decline option improves the consent rate but breaks the rules for EU visitors and damages trust. The more honest solution is to track less: anyone who does without advertising cookies and uses cookieless analytics may not need a consent banner at all. What cookies are technically and which types exist is explained under Cookies.
Example: a banner for an SME website running Google Ads
Suppose a dental centre runs Google Ads and wants to measure appointment bookings. The website gets a banner with three equally weighted buttons (Accept all, Decline, Settings); analytics and marketing are disabled by default. Consent Mode passes the decision on to Google; only with consent are analytics and advertising tags fully loaded. The privacy policy lists the services used specifically.
In addition, cookieless analytics measures the basic figures of all visits, so that the website can still be evaluated even with many refusals. How we set up this measurement technically is described under Conversion Tracking Agency Zurich; whether your website meets the basics is shown by a website audit.
Related Page
Cookieless TrackingFrequently Asked Questions About Cookie Banner
Swiss law does not require a general opt-in banner, but it does require information about cookies and a way to refuse them (Art. 45c FMG), as well as transparency about data processing under the Data Protection Act. As soon as your website also addresses visitors from the EU, or you use Google advertising features with personalised data, a banner with genuine consent is the safe route in practice. A legal assessment of the individual case is a matter for a specialist.
An interface through which the cookie banner passes the visitor's decision on to Google services. If the visitor declines, the tags send only limited, cookieless signals, from which Google partly models the missing conversions.
Because visitors who decline are no longer recorded, or only to a limited extent. That is not an error but the purpose of the banner. The visits still take place; they just no longer appear in full in the statistics.
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