The data that you collect on your Squarespace website is critical to enabling you to do business and reach a growing audience. You need personal data to process orders, develop your advertising strategy, improve your site’s user experience and products, and more.
Collecting data means that you need to comply with data privacy requirements. Some of those requirements are regulatory, for laws like the GDPR or CCPA. Others are business requirements, for important platforms like Google that ecommerce site operators rely on for advertising, analytics, and other key marketing functions.
These requirements can include obtaining consent for data collection and use, informing visitors and customers about what data is collected and how it’s used, and enabling them to exercise their rights, among other functions, which vary by law, framework, or policy.
Squarespace consent management strategy enables you to meet privacy compliance requirements and protect your business. But it also enables you to maintain and grow your marketing efforts and build trust with your target audience. Providing great user experience, clear information, and user-friendly choices builds trust and turns prospects into repeat customers.
In this article, we’ll look at why your Squarespace site needs a cookie banner, how it benefits your data privacy and marketing performance strategies, and how to set one up to support customer-friendly Privacy-Led Marketing and Squarespace cookie consent.
Why your Squarespace website needs a cookie banner
First, let’s take a look at the reasons why having a Squarespace cookie consent banner on your website is so important for your business. Then we’ll move on to the implementation process.
Maintain your campaigns on Google services
Many Squarespace site owners rely on Google Ads campaigns for traffic, especially retargeting. With Google’s privacy requirements evolving for those that rely on its platforms, understanding their policies and meeting those stipulations is critical.
Implementing Squarespace cookie consent via Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP and displaying a compliant consent banner enables you to maintain full access to Google services you rely on, including key features like personalization and remarketing in Google Ads.
Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP comes with Google Consent Mode v2 built in and ready to start collecting and signaling user consent. The combination enables you to obtain compliant consent information from your website visitors and customers, then signal it via Consent Mode to Google services. Firing of tags for ads, analytics, and other services that collect and process personal data are controlled by those consent choices, and information is only collected when users consent to it.
Advanced Consent Mode enables you to do even more. Gain deeper insights into the user journey with tools like conversion modeling, even when users decline consent. Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP and Consent Mode are your competitive advantage and critical to continuing successful marketing campaigns in the Privacy-Led era.
Show your commitment to privacy with Privacy-Led Marketing
Marketers have a job to do that grows more complex every day, with evolving data privacy regulations, tech platform requirements, audience demands, and more. Headlines about data breaches and huge regulatory violation fines can make anyone really nervous. But you need to also stay focused on getting your audience’s attention, making sales, analyzing data, and improving your strategies.
Your Squarespace cookie consent banner can be a powerful tool, along with important information like a Squarespace cookie policy, to enable you to maintain access to important platforms, as noted, but also to clearly demonstrate your commitment to respecting privacy and putting your users in control of their data and doing business with you.
Trust is the only thing that really matters for brands, and people don’t do business with companies they don’t trust. When you provide clear information about data use, consent options, and people’s rights, however, your Squarespace cookie banner helps build trust. It keeps customers informed and coming back to your site and helps grow your bottom line and enables you to obtain more valuable marketing data.
Stay compliant with privacy regulations and avoid penalties
Data privacy regulations are global, and for ecommerce websites, your customers can be pretty much anywhere. So there is a strong chance you need to comply with at least one regulation. Not to mention frameworks, policies, and tech platforms’ requirements. These rules are always evolving, and it can be challenging to keep up.
Data protection authorities do enforce laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Directive in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States with companies of all sizes, even if it’s the big companies that make headlines with hefty fines.
Providing users with clear information is common to all privacy laws. People whose data you are collecting and using need to be informed about what data you collect, for what purposes, how long you retain it, who may have access to it, and other requirements. They must also be informed about their rights and how to access them. Your Squarespace cookie consent banner and cookie policy (likely within your larger privacy policy) enable you to provide this information in a clear, user-friendly way, as well as enabling consent options that meet legal requirements.
In addition to potential fines, other penalties, data loss, and ongoing audits from data privacy violations, the loss of brand reputation and customer trust can be a serious blow to your bottom line. Current and potential customers will likely take their business elsewhere. Other important groups also don’t tend to like the look of a history of violations or failing to properly protect data and privacy. These include advertisers, potential business partners, investors, and others.
A clear, customized cookie banner not only helps protect your business, but sends a strong message to your customers while helping you maintain high consent rates and obtaining data you need and access to critical marketing platforms.
Steps to add a cookie banner to your Squarespace website
You’re busy and you need your website to just work. Fortunately, you can integrate your cookie consent banner with your Squarespace account in a few simple steps. Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP easily integrates with Squarespace landing pages and other pages on your site.
1. Sign up for your Usercentrics Cookiebot account
At the top right of the Usercentrics website homepage, click on the START FREE button. Click the Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP tab and you can sign up for your 14-day free trial at the next step.
2. Configuring your banner in the Usercentrics Cookiebot Admin Interface
Once you have set up your account or logged in, you will set up your configuration. Click on Configuration in the Admin Interface. This includes adding the information about the domain — your Squarespace site — where the banner will be displayed, language preference, etc.
3. Initial website scan
Click on Service Settings in the Admin Interface to get started with the initial scan of your Squarespace website to detect cookies and trackers in use, the Data Processing Services (DPS). Click the Initial Website Scan button.Once completed, it will generate your scan report under DPS Overview.
4. Categorizing Data Processing Services
The CMP will automatically categorize the DPS for you. Marketing, Functional, and Essential are included by default. However, if anything comes up as unclassified, or you want to manually edit the classifications, you can do that under Service Categories. You can use our predefined categories or define your own.
5. Add the Data Processing Services
Using the list from the initial scan report, add all the relevant cookies and tracking technologies for your website by clicking Add Service to the right of each DPS listing. These will be added to the CMP, and users will be able to access and control consent for them granularly by categories. This list of DPS will also be available for your Cookie Declaration. Learn more.
Note: Ensure that the scripts for the DPS are adjusted to enable blocking until consent is obtained.
6. Customize banner appearance
Click Appearance to begin customizing your consent banner. Adjust the brand styling, logos, fonts, and more under the Styling tab. Under the Layout tab you can customize the first and second layer settings for the banner, as well as the Privacy Trigger, which is a shortcut that enables users who have already communicated their consent preferences to update their consent. Learn more.
Click the Content tab, and there you can customize the text, links, and other elements to be displayed to users. Usercentrics CMP is available in 60 languages. Here you can also customize the information for relevant laws, e.g. the “Do Not Sell Or Share My Personal Information” link for the CCPA.
7. Implement the CMP on your Squarespace website
Login to your Squarespace account, and follow the steps in our Squarespace Implementation Guide to use Google Tag Manager to get set up and start collecting user consent.
8. Monitor your Squarespace site’s cookie usage regularly
Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP scans your site monthly to detect cookies and other trackers in use. You’ll automatically receive the scan report in your email inbox (both once the initial scan is completed, and the regular scans). Check your scan reports to make sure you stay up to date on the cookies and trackers you’re using, especially third-party ones. You want to make sure they’re correctly classified with an accurate purpose description.
It’s critical to privacy compliance that only the cookie categories to which your customers consent are activated. The scan information also automatically updates your Cookie Declaration so you can keep your privacy policy up to date as well as your consent banner.
Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP helps you achieve and maintain privacy compliance for your Squarespace website
Make it easy to inform your customers about your data handling, enable them to exercise their privacy rights, and meet regulatory and business requirements to maintain your access to all the marketing tools and platforms that you rely on. Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP helps you streamline privacy compliance, grow your marketing, build trust, and maintain peace of mind.
In just a few steps, set up your customized banner and obtain Squarespace cookie consent. It’s user-friendly, looks great, helps you maintain high consent rates for important data, and helps protect your business.
We’ve also automated plenty of functions because we know you’re busy, including detecting and classifying cookies and trackers on an ongoing basis, updating your banner content and privacy policy, providing legal templates, and more. So you can stay focused on making customers happy and growing your business.