More consented data, better campaigns: how Evensen Marketing pushed Nunataq's opt-in rate from 50% to 73%

Not every website visitor will consent to cookies, and privacy rights granted by the GDPR mean they don’t have to. For businesses running paid campaigns, that directly affects how much of their own audience shows up in Google Ads and GA4.

But consent rates aren't fixed. The banner configuration, visual design, language, and branding all influence whether a visitor consents or quietly declines and continues browsing. For Nunataq, a Norwegian outdoor retailer, that gap was 23 percentage points.

By implementing Cookiebot CMP and systematically optimizing visitors’ consent experience, Evensen Marketing pushed their client's acceptance rate from 50 percent to 73 percent, putting significantly more of Nunataq's audience back inside the platforms their campaigns depend on.

The company

Ravn Sebastian Evensen runs Evensen Marketing, a Google Ads specialist agency serving clients across the Nordics and Europe. Besides campaign management, the agency builds and maintains the tracking and analytics infrastructure that makes Google Ads perform, including the consent setup that determines how much data actually reaches the platforms.

Before starting his own agency, Evensen collaborated directly with Google, advising on more than 500 accounts. Today, Evensen Marketing works with more than 20 brands across multiple segments, including internationally recognized names like Dermalogica.

Nunataq is one of those clients. The outdoor and sports retailer is based in Ski, Norway, stocking gear from brands including Patagonia, Haglöfs, Norrøna, and Mammut. They came to Evensen Marketing to improve the performance of their Google Ads campaigns. Getting more from those campaigns meant getting more data into them first.

Challenge

By 2018, Clece had 34 active domains managed across a fragmented mix of internal departments For Nunataq's campaigns to run on accurate data, they needed website visitors to consent to tracking. Under the GDPR, that consent is the visitor's choice, and a portion of any site's audience will decline regardless of what any displayed consent banner says. But a significant additional portion of any audience sits on the fence, and the banner experience itself helps determine whether they consent or not.

When Evensen reviewed Nunataq's consent setup as part of their Google Ads collaboration, only roughly 50 percent of visitors were accepting cookies. As Evensen put it: "First and foremost, there's a legal aspect, but in terms of your data, you need to know what percentage of your visitors are actually contributing with interaction data."

At 50 percent, half of Nunataq's visitors were invisible to their campaigns — no behavioral signals, no conversion data, no attribution. The banner was privacy-compliant, but it hadn't been configured to earn the consent rates that a well-optimized experience could produce. That was the gap Evensen set out to close.

Why Evensen Marketing chose Usercentrics Cookiebot CMP

For an agency managing Google Ads across multiple client accounts, the consent management platform needs to work reliably in the background. It needed to be privacy-compliant by default, fast to deploy, and native to the rest of the stack.

What makes the difference between a banner that satisfies a legal requirement and one that earns data is sufficient configuration control to actually influence consent rates — and Cookiebot CMP fits how Evensen works.

As he explained:"I've always liked how the banner looked, their good brand reputation and the ease of activating the banner through Google Tag Manager (GTM)."

GTM integration was especially important. It meant Evensen could get a banner live and properly connected to Google Consent Mode without touching Nunataq's codebase, then focus on the configuration decisions that would actually move the consent rate.

Implementation and results

With GTM already installed on Nunataq's site, getting Cookiebot CMP live only took Evensen five to ten minutes — and no developer required. Nunataq's owner had expected the process to be difficult and expensive. It was neither, and that ease of installation meant Evensen could move straight to the work that would actually shift the consent rate.

With the 50 percent opt-in rate, half of Nunataq's visitors weren't contributing interaction data to the campaigns that were running. Evensen worked through the banner configuration to identify how consent rates could be optimized. He made two changes.

Branding

Evensen added Nunataq's logo and branding to the banner. Without it, a consent prompt can feel like a generic third-party request that visitors have no particular reason to engage with. With custom branding, the consent banner is clearly coming from a brand the visitor has already chosen to engage with.

Language

Evensen set the banner to display in Norwegian only. Nunataq serves a Norwegian market, and asking that audience to interact with a banner in another language or to navigate language options at all adds unnecessary friction at exactly the moment you're asking for their engagement.

In the end, the consent rate increased from 50 percent to 73 percent, measured across 20,000 consent events. 23 percent more of Nunataq’s visitors now contribute behavioral data and conversion signals to the Google Ads and GA4 accounts their campaigns depend on.

For Evensen Marketing, the Nunataq result is a proof point for something most clients haven't considered: consent configuration is part of campaign performance, not separate from it. A banner that earns higher consent rates delivers more data. More data means more accurate attribution, sharper signals for Google's algorithms, and campaigns that can be optimized based on what's actually happening.

As Evensen put it when describing why this matters to the clients he works with: "It's a must to get up on the website, to be able to use the marketing platforms such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, and so on to the fullest capability without having any issues."