How does user consent affect event tracking?

Your visitors’ consent may determine whether the OpenAI Ads Pixel is allowed to send measurement events from your shop. When consent is required and has not been granted, the relevant events must not be sent.

This may reduce the number of conversions measured and attributed to your campaigns. It does not necessarily mean that no sale took place: it means that some actions cannot be tracked or matched to an ad based on the visitor’s choice.

Consent and event delivery

The OpenAI Ads Pixel includes a consent mechanism. When measurement consent is set to false, the Pixel does not send event requests. When it is set to true, future events can be sent.

Events blocked before the visitor grants consent are not automatically replayed if the visitor later accepts tracking. It is therefore important that your consent management tool communicates the visitor’s choice before the Pixel is initialized.

[Screenshot of the consent configuration in the ChatGPT Ads module or in the shop’s consent management tool, showing the setting that allows or blocks OpenAI Ads tracking.]

Impact on reported conversions

OpenAI Ads Manager can report only an event that was actually received, matches a conversion configured for the campaign, and can be linked to an eligible ad interaction.

If a visitor refuses tracking consent, blocked events cannot contribute to the conversion statistics measured by the Pixel. The performance displayed in Ads Manager may therefore be lower than the actual number of actions completed in your shop.

Differences may also appear between OpenAI Ads Manager data and other analytics tools. Consent rules, attribution windows, redirects, browsers, and deduplication methods can all affect results.

[Screenshot of OpenAI Ads Manager, showing campaign conversion results and the Web data source information.]

Advanced matching and user data

OpenAI states that the Pixel may use automatic advanced matching to improve attribution when a click reference is not available. The Pixel may then detect supported customer information in forms on your website.

This information is normalized and hashed in the browser using SHA-256 before it is sent with conversion events. Raw information is not sent to OpenAI through this feature.

You must inform visitors about the data collected on your website and obtain the required consent before sending conversion data, in accordance with the rules that apply to your business and shop.

Check your configuration

Test how tracking behaves for the different choices offered by your consent management tool. In particular, check that no events are sent when tracking is refused and that the expected events are received after the visitor grants consent.

To understand the role of the Pixel and how to enable it, see our FAQ What is the Pixel used for, and why should I enable it?. To learn more about the data used for matching, also see our FAQ How does customer matching work and what data is used?.

You can refer to the official OpenAI Ads Measurement Pixel documentation and the Conversion Measurement documentation.