While visiting a website for the first time, you may notice a banner that informs you about the site using trackers and cookies to make the user experience better. That notice is called GDPR Cookie consent and is an important part of a website if the users are from the European region.
The GDPR has made it mandatory for the site owners to let the users know about the personal data being collected by the site. This lets the users deactivate the unnecessary cookies that are collecting data for advertising and tracking purposes.
There are dozens of Cookie notice plugins and custom codes available on the internet out of which Cookiebot stands tall because of its amazing features and ability to scan the cookies and trackers on your domain.
In this article, we will be writing down the features of Cookiebot, and the process of installing it on your website. Make sure you read the article till the end to get along with the topic.
What is Cookiebot?
Cookiebot is a cloud service cookie tool programmed by Cybot providing companies, blogs, and ecommerce sites a simple and straightforward way to get more information about the cookies. It is a self-serve cloud service and an online tracking consent solution that follows the regulations of the EU digital privacy direction 2009/136/EC and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It also helps you to understand what type of data your site collects from the user and whether it adheres to the regulations of GDPR and the EPrivacy Directive (ePR). In simpler words, it is a GDPR compliant cookie and online tracking tool.
Cookiebot provides you:
- Details about the cookies on your site
- Confirmation of the visitors on your site before storing cookies and trackers in their devices
- An option to opt-out of the cookies and trackers
- An option to change the choice in future
Features of Cookiebot
Cookiebot is more than just a cookie notice banner. As aforementioned, it gives a piece of detailed information about the type of cookies on a website and let the visitors make a choice to store cookies in their system or not. It comes with a plethora of features, let us take a closer look at the features of Cookiebot.
- Scan cookies automatically
Cookiebot performs the automated scan once a month and audits the website by finding out the cookies in (HTTP/JavaScript cookies, HTML5 Local Storage, Flash Local Shared Object, Silverlight Isolated Storage, Indexed DB, ultrasound beacons, pixel tags) thereafter generating a cookie declaration with a brief description of the scanned cookies on the website.
You can then publish the cookie report on the entire site or a subpage by inserting a small JavaScript code on the specific page or the entire website. Hence, a cookie banner consent will be displayed to the first-time visitor and let him decide about storing the cookies in the system or rejecting them.
- Cookie repository
Cookiebot repository has information about all the global cookies with detailed descriptions and its purpose. Whenever these cookies are found on your website, cookiebot extracts the information from the repository and describes the use of the cookie to your visitors.
- GDPR Consent Banner
The most important thing is displaying a cookie notice on your website. With a short JavaScript code, you can display the cookie banner on your website and let the visitors make a choice of letting the cookies be stored in the system or not.
Upon submitting the choices, cookiebot remembers it for up to 12 months, and after that, it will display the cookie consent banner once again for the same visitor.
- Control over Cookies
Another amazing thing about Cookiebot is that it lets you decide which cookies should be on your site. You don’t have to leave it on your visitors to decide which cookies to store and which cookies to reject, Cookiebot gives user a simplicity to choose between the four types of cookies among the several hundred cookies providers.
Moreover, Cookiebot makes sure that all the necessary cookies are set aside prior to user consent and let the users make a choice before storing the unnecessary cookies. It can also restrict the first-party and third-party cookies and trackers on your site.
In the cookie manager, you can find out the firstly discovered cookie URL which simplifies the process of identifying the script’s settings cookies.
- Multiple domains
If you operate multiple websites from different domains and/or your website operates from several sub-domains, Cookiebot can ask your website visitors for consent that covers all your domains.
If you manage multiple websites through different domains and want the consent of a visitor for all the websites, Cookiebot will handle it for you. You just have to enable the feature and the consent banner will be prompted only once every time the visitor visits the website.
- Multi-language support
If you have visitors from different regions of the world, you can customize the cookie consent banner according to the region. There are 45 languages available right now and cookiebot automatically detects the user’s default language and displays consent in the user’s preferred language.
- SSL encryption
All of the visitor consents are collected via a secure SSL connection and stored with unbreakable encrypted keys.
- Hassle-less setup
There’s no need to install a plugin on your website, all you need to do is copy paste a JavaScript code from the cookie manager on either a specific page of your site or the entire website. After pasting the code, the GDPR Cookie consent banner will start displaying to the new visitors on the site.
Setting Up CookieBot on Your Website
You can try Cookiebot on your small blog or site that has less than 100 subpages. With the free plan you can set up cookiebot on your site but most of the features in the free plan are locked. Anyway, let us go through the procedure of setting up Cookiebot on your website.
- You first have to create an account on the Cookiebot website and activate it with the activation key that will be sent to your mail.
- Go to the signup page and create an account. Now check your mailbox for the activation key and enter it in the text field.
- Now add the domain that you want to scan for cookies. Please see, the scanning procedure will take some time depending upon the size of your website. It takes around 6 to 24 hours for a full scan; in my case, it took less than 2 hours.
- Click on the dialog box option from the menu. From the template settings, choose where you want to display the banner on your website.
- To add the script on your site, select “your scripts” and copy the JavaScript code.
- You now have to paste this code inside the <head> </head> section of your website. If you are using WordPress, you can do this with the theme editor or using a free plugin called “insert header and footer”.
- Save the changes made, and that’s all you need to do.
- You can clear the cache of your website if you are using a cache plugin and open your website in incognito mode to check if the banner has started showing or not.
Cookiebot Pricing
The pricing of Cookiebot depends upon the number of pages your site has and the number of domains where you wish to setup Cookiebot. The subdomains are considered as separate domains by Cookiebot as their system scans the subdomains separately.
If you wish to try Cookiebot for free, you can add up just one domain with less than 100 pages where premium features such as Customize banner, Customize declaration, multiple languages, e-mail reports, data-export, geolocation, bulk consent, consent statistics, internal domain alias for development, test and staging are locked.
The price chart below will give you a complete idea of the plans available.
Is Cookiebot worth it?
Cookiebot is a feature-packed cookie consent plugin that scans your website and lists down the cookies and trackers according to their nature with detailed information. It is important for the users to know what type of data will be collected from them and for what purposes.
With a simple cookie consent banner, you can let your users decide whether they want the site to store cookies in their system or not.
Talking about the pricing and plan, Cookiebot performs monthly scans on your website to find out the cookies and trackers. This helps you to keep a record of the cookies on your website, which can also be done with the free plan but with many features being locked.
Overall, the pricing of Cookiebot is justified if we closely look at the features it offers. It is more than just a cookie banner plugin and worth every penny spent.
