Configuration of the tracking consent categories

Bloomreach supports a standalone tracking consent feature to help you comply with regulations that require explicit consent before accessing data on a user’s device. Regulators in several EU countries, including France, Germany, and Italy, treat tracking pixels and tracked links in email as access to the recipient’s device. In these countries, you need prior consent unless an exemption applies.

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Important

This article is for informational purposes only. Contact your Legal team for advice on your specific situation.

When enabled, the feature applies tracking consent to in-app messages and the following scenario action nodes: browser push, email, mobile push, MMS, and SMS.

Set consent for opens and clicks separately

In each email campaign and email node, you select 2 tracking consent categories:

• Opens: The category a recipient must have consented to before Bloomreach adds the open pixel.
• Clicks: The category a recipient must have consented to before Bloomreach tracks clicks on links.

Select a separate category for each when recipients can agree to one without the other. Select the same category for both when you ask for a single consent. Leave one empty to track that status as usual.

Affected events and statuses

When tracking consent is enabled and configured, the following statuses can require prior explicit consent:

For email and transactional email, opened follows the category you select for opens, and clicked follows the category you select for clicks.

Campaigns without configured tracking consent continue to process tracking as usual. Each affected event includes a consent_category_tracking attribute that records which tracking consent category was used.

Existing tracking consent categories

Before the split, an email campaign or email node had one tracking consent category for both opens and clicks. If you selected a category, Bloomreach applies it to both. Tracking behaves as before until you select different categories.

When recipients withdraw consent

Bloomreach checks tracking consent when it sends an email. If a recipient withdraws consent after you send, opens and clicks on that email can still be recorded. Don't use these opens and clicks for profiling or targeting. Stopping this tracking on emails already sent is planned for a future release.

Prerequisites

Before you enable this feature, collect prior explicit consent for tracking. Contact your Customer Success Manager to set up the consent collection use case. Tell recipients how you use open pixels and tracked links before you track them. Some regulators require advance notice of tracking.

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Important

Enabling this feature affects open rates and click-through rates in the email evaluation dashboard. Contact your Customer Success Manager to set up a custom evaluation dashboard that reflects prior explicit consent for tracking.

Force click tracking

In some cases, you need to track a click before you can collect consent, for example in a double opt-in flow. Add the xnpe_force_track URL query parameter to force click tracking for a specific link. Use it only for exceptions like this. To track clicks for more recipients, change the click tracking consent setting of your campaign or email node instead.

When this parameter is present, tracking consent is ignored and a clicked event is recorded with an additional tracking_forced attribute.

The parameter must be lowercase. The following values evaluate as true:

• https://example.com/?xnpe_force_track
• https://example.com/?xnpe_force_track=true
• https://example.com/?xnpe_force_track=1

SMS campaign setup

In the SMS campaign editor, add the xnpe_force_track query parameter to the link in your message body, for example https://example.com/confirm?xnpe_force_track=true. This is typically the confirmation link in a double opt-in flow.

Campaign settings

In the campaign settings, you can configure tracking behavior at the campaign level. When xnpe_force_track is used on a specific link, it overrides the campaign-level tracking consent setting for that link only.

Consent setup of customer

In the customer profile, consent categories are listed with their current status. A customer without tracking consent configured shows no active tracking consent category. In this scenario, force click tracking applies and records the click before consent is collected.

Clicked campaign event

In the event log, a forced click appears as a standard campaign event with action_type: sms and status: clicked. It includes an additional tracking_forced: true attribute, which distinguishes it from clicks tracked under normal consent rules.

Transactional emails

The Transactional Email API includes these optional parameters in the settings object:

• consent_category
• consent_category_tracking
• tracking_consent_categories

These parameters override the default API behavior and apply tracking consent category rules to transactional emails.

Use tracking_consent_categories to select one tracking consent category for opens (open) and one for clicks (click). The deprecated consent_category_tracking still works, so existing setups aren't disrupted, and applies the same category to both. Send either tracking_consent_categories or consent_category_tracking, not both.

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Note

The tracking consent feature is disabled by default. To enable it for your project, contact your Customer Success Manager.