Verifying the CookieOfficer setup on your site

A banner that is visible on a website doesn't always mean the setup is correct. The script may be working, and yet cookies and trackers may still start before the visitor has given consent. Below you'll find ways to verify your setup.

Test 1: Is the banner set up on the site?

Go to the Installation page and click “Verify now”. If the setup succeeds, you'll see the heading “Script detected and active”, and below it the message “The CookieOfficer banner is running on” followed by the domain name. Otherwise, the panel will show “CookieOfficer banner not detected” and ask you to check that the code is inside the <head> section and to refresh the page.

The test only confirms that the banner is present on the specified domain. It doesn't check the order of scripts or the effectiveness of blocking.

Test 2: Is the banner shown to visitors?

Open the site in an incognito window. The banner should appear on the first visit, disappear after you make a choice, and not appear again after you refresh the page.

Incognito mode is required here because in a regular browser window your own decision is already saved and the banner won't appear.

Test 3: Is the visitor's consent status saved correctly?

In an incognito window, click any button in the banner, then in the browser's developer tools, in the cookie storage, check the co_consent entry for your host.

Before you react to the banner, you won't find the entry, and this is the correct behaviour. It is created only after the visitor makes a decision. If it is still missing after you click, look in the browser console.

Test 4: Does blocking actually work?

This is the only test that checks whether the whole setup serves its purpose. Run a new scan of your site, and when it finishes, go to the Cookies page and look at the message above the list of detected items.

If you see a sentence about cookies and trackers running after the visitor has rejected consent, blocking hasn't fully worked. In automatic mode, the most common causes are:

• the CookieOfficer code runs after other scripts,
• an optimisation plugin that has moved our code to the end of the page

The absence of a warning message is a good sign only if the scan finished successfully. A failed scan won't show a warning either, so first check its status in the Scan history tab. A failed attempt has an “Attempt failed” badge there.

What else is worth checking in the browser console?

The console is the only place where you'll see four errors that aren't visible in the panel:

1. Double setup: “snippet loaded twice, second instance inactive”. The code is on the page twice, for example once in the template and once in the Google Tag Manager container.
2. Mismatched ID: “data-co-id does not match the site in the script, check the installation code. Banner inactive”. The ID in the attribute differs from the one in the script URL, so the banner doesn't start.
3. Host outside the domain group: “does not belong to the site's domain group, banner inactive”. This is what it looks like when you copy the code to another domain without adding that domain to the project. Add it on the Domains page, using the “Add domain” button.
4. Missing Google default consent block: “missing Google Consent Mode block, default consent, in the head section. Google tags may fire before the visitor's decision”. The message appears only when Consent Mode is turned on and the setup is done with code on the site. Copy the missing block from the Installation page.

You can recognise a host outside the group because the banner doesn't appear at all and the panel shows no warning. When the setup is done through Google Tag Manager, there is a second effect: consent stays at “denied”, so Google tags measure without cookies, and it looks like a working setup although nobody has asked the visitor anything.

When is it worth repeating the verification?

Right after the setup, and then after every major change on the site: installing a new plugin, adding a tag in Google Tag Manager, changing the template or turning on optimisation.