Legal Hub
The JENTIS Data Capturing platform was developed in a modern web era, where consent and privacy were already established topics. Compared to other solutions that have to adapt their defaults as something new and not part of their core from the beginning on. Hence why our framework benefits from ideas that are building blocks to a resilient foundation such as the JENTIS Consent Engine.
This enables JENTIS to detach triggers (conditions that define when to activate a data stream) from actual consent information. As this is a highly complex topic with many facets, we will cover all the basics first. Then we will dive into more specific and individual setups in this article.
JENTIS Consent Engine
The JENTIS Consent Engine is a concept of multiple elements working as a whole: tools, CMP connectors, and vendors. This engine then applies logic to get everything aligned in a convenient way.
If you do not intend to facilitate all of the JENTIS Consent Engine features, you can either decide to deactivate it altogether or push consent information manually. You will find the details of both options at the bottom of this article.
To handle consent in JENTIS Tag Manager, you have three core elements:
Tools: A tool configuration instance that holds global values of a tool that you want to activate with JENTIS (ie. "Web Analytics Tool 1 - US" and "Web Analytics Tool 2 - EU" are the same tool but different configuration instances for different websites)
Vendors: A typical vendor that represents tool instances (one tool instance is always connected to a particular vendor; a vendor can be connected to multiple tool instances in your configuration); "Web Analytics Tool" might be the common vendor that is used with your configured tools "Web Analytics Tool 1 - US" and "Web Analytics Tool 2 - EU".
CMP Connectors: A consent management platform is the tool of your choice to handle consent on your website (ie. "User Centrics" or "OneTrust"); in JENTIS you decide which website (JENTIS Tag Manager container) connects to which CMP; we'll get into this detail further in the article.
Now with this basic vacabulary we can dig deeper into the consent engine concept with JENTIS Data Capturing. The following features are provided with this concept:
Clean Trigger: You don't need to have any consent-related condition in any trigger at all, this removes a lot of complexity and cleans up your tag manager.
Reprocessing of Consent: With the detachment of triggers and consent there is no need to keep track of what happened first on your site: a page_load event or the decision of the user to consent or deny. JENTIS Consent Engine will figure out what to do at what time.
To give you more details on the a little bit more complex topic of reprocessing consent. This only applies on the scope of one page (and not for a full session or journey of multiple sessions).
Let's imagine a user lands on your page for the first time and gets the consent banner presented. Now your website already triggered the signal "track: pageview" (to indicate that we want to track a pageview signal with JENTIS). Everything is on hold until the consent situation is settled. Now the user declines consent and with that event JENTIS will reaccess all events that were pushed previously. If this decision of the user changes the outcome of the desired data to be streamed to a tool, we will now reevaluate the trigger and fire the tags accordingly. No need to have different or multiple trigger conditions (pre and post consent decision).
Setup Consent with JENTIS Data Capturing Platform
One of the key features with the JENTIS Consent Engine is the easy setup. It is only an initial setting that you apply when a tool is added to your configuration for the first time. After that it is fire&forget, easy as that.
Follow this instructions when a tool is added to a configuration. First a very broad set of steps and then we will go through each step in detail one by one.
Add a tool to your account and decide on what containers it will be used (on which websites).
Set the vendor of this tool instance (optional).
Define your prefered consent application for this vendor (consent, essential mode or without consent).
Select for your container which CMP connector is to be used (once per container).
Adjust mapping of JENTIS vendors to CMP vendors (optional, if customization is required).
Adjust mapping of tools to JENTIS vendors (optional, if customization is required).
Multiple of those steps are only optional, if you need more customization options. For the most cases the default will be a good starting point.
Add a new Tool Configuration
Navigate to the section "Tools" from the main navigation.
Here you can either customize an existing tool or add the first tool instance configuration. In that process you can select on which containers this tool will be used:
Each container is in general a surrogate to a website. With this setting you control if the same tool should be activated on multiple website with the same settings (tags, triggers, variables, etc). If you need more information on the account and containers, here you go: JENTIS Accounts and Containers
Set the Vendor for this Tool
Now on the configuration of a tool you have the vendor settings available (Advanced Settings).
On the "Vendor Settings" you can adjust the mapping if required. By default every tool in JENTIS has a default vendor with the same generic name. For example if "Google Analytics 4" is a generic tool in JENTIS, you can configure your specific instance of this tool and name it "GA4". The default vendor for this tool will be the same generic: "Google Analytics 4". If you decide to have it mapped to a different vendor you can do so in this setting. You can also create custom vendors in the next steps.
Set the Consent Application
The following setting must be applied in close coordination with your Data Privacy Officer.
Navigate to the "Legal Hub" from the main menu section. Open the "Vendors" sub menu section.
By default the "Consent Mode" is selected with a vendor in JENTIS. You can decide to use the "Essential Mode" to have two configuration options for this tools tags (a "default" with consent and a "fallback" without, where personally identifiable information is removed securily with JENTIS). As of the high complexity of this topic we created its own article to guide on this setup JENTIS Essential Mode.
Select the CMP Connector
The following section applies if you will use either "Essential Mode" or "Consent Mode" for a given vendor in JENTIS.
Navigate to the "Legal Hub" from the main menu section. There select the "Consentbars" sub menu item. Here comes a list of all supported CMP providers. Select which one applies to your website, ie. "User Centrics". Here you can now select to use this CMP with a certain website (container) with JENTIS Data Capture platform.
Make sure to have a CMP connection selected for your container.
This setting is only required once per container. And only once you decide to use different CMP, so it is a setting that you often will see only once on the initial setup.
Adjust Vendor (JENTIS) to Vendor (CMP) Mapping
Now JENTIS knows which tools you want to use and which CMP (Consent Management Platform) provider you have. There is one more level of detail configuration that however is optional.
This relates to the mapping of a vendor in JENTIS to a vendor in the CMP. For example a tool "Google Analytics 4" is a default vendor in JENTIS that might map to either a category or vendor on your CMP providers endpoint.
Navigate to the "Legal Hub" from the main menu section. Open the "Vendors" sub menu section.
Here you can select for each CMP connection how this vendor is represented in your CMP. For example for Use Centrics connection that means that a vendor will be mapped to a "template id" from User Centrics.
With this setting JENTIS will establish a connection to your CMP provider and apply consent accordingly based on the CMPs information.
Turn Off Consent Engine in JENTIS Tag Manager
With the following setting you can turn off the Consent Engine in JENTIS Tag Manager. This will result in a configuration where no consent is awaited and tracking can be activated at any time. However all JENTIS Consent functionality is lost at the same time, disconnecting your Tag Management from any consent information.
Navigate to your account administration settings and select “Consent Administration”. Here you will find a toggle to apply this decision.
Warning: Be sure to only use this mode in respect of all legal consequences that are subject of your compliance assessment.
This setting will give you the option to apply different tool and tag configurations based on consent and even before the moment a user interacted with a consent banner. You can combine this with JENTIS Essential Mode.
JENTIS CMP - DEPRECATED
Each container must have a connection to a CMP. The only other option would be to deactivate the consent engine as a whole (this option is described in detail below).
JENTIS provides its own consent management platform (CMP). It can either connect to an existing third party CMP or you can manage consent related data and connections in the interfaces described in the following sections.
JENTIS Visual CMP deprecated
Though this CMP code for visual presentation of a banner is still available and functional as of that latest version it is not further developed any more. There are no new features developed currently and hence the code is marked deprecated. We are recommending to use a dedicated CMP provider for the frontend and graphical integration of an appropriate banner on your website.
To better understand the provided solutions of JENTIS Consent Engine (technical API, not deprecated) and the JENTIS CMP (deprecated), please also refere to our technical reference on consent in JENTIS: Consent SDK Basics