Banner settings: behavior, consent expiry, and categories

Not everything about your banner is drawn on the canvas. Blocking behavior, how long a visitor's choice is remembered, where the reopen button sits, consent-framework signals, and custom categories all live in one place: the Settings dialog in Banner Studio. This guide walks through each tab and what to set where.

Opening Settings

Click Settings in the Studio sub-bar, next to Templates. It opens as a dialog with five tabs across the top: Behaviour, Consent, Targeting, Appearance, and Categories. Changes in Behaviour and Appearance apply as soon as you make them (to the draft, same as canvas edits) — you still need to click Publish back in the main toolbar to push them live.

Behaviour

This tab controls how the banner actually behaves before and after a visitor responds:

• Blocking mode — choose Auto (Cookie Munch detects and blocks known third-party trackers automatically before consent) or Manual (you tag which scripts to block yourself with markup on your site). Auto is the right default for most sites.

• Ignore selectors — a comma-separated list of CSS selectors to exclude from auto-blocking, e.g. #chat, .no-block, for scripts you never want touched.

• Re-ask after — a slider from 0 to 730 days controlling how long a visitor's consent decision is remembered before the banner reappears and asks again. Set it to 0 to never re-ask.

• Suppress bots — skip showing the banner to detected bot and crawler traffic, so it doesn't affect SEO crawls or uptime monitors.

• Observe cookies — lets the embed report the cookie names it actually sees back to the cookie scanner, which keeps your cookie declaration accurate over time without manual re-scanning.

• Implied consent — whether interacting with the page (for example, scrolling past the banner) counts as accepting, versus requiring an explicit click.

Below Behaviour, this tab also has a reopen button toggle — the small persistent control that lets visitors reopen their cookie preferences after the first decision. Turn it on, then choose its screen corner (bottom-left, bottom-right, top-left, or top-right), its label text, and whether it should appear for every visitor or only those in regions where consent was actually required.

Further down, cross-device consent sync lets a signed-in visitor's choice follow them across devices by posting decisions to an endpoint you control — turn it on and supply that endpoint's URL if you need this.

Consent

This tab gathers every signal sent to ad and analytics vendors in one spot:

• Consent Mode — enable Google Consent Mode v2, choose Basic or Advanced mode, and set how long (in milliseconds) the page should wait for an update before firing tags.

• TCF (Pro plan) — enable IAB TCF v2.2 and configure your CMP ID, publisher country code, vendor IDs, purpose IDs, CMP/GVL versions, and whether the framework activates automatically based on visitor region.

• US State Privacy — turn on GPP (Global Privacy Platform) for specific US states and the legacy US Privacy String independently of TCF; these are available on every plan.

• Personalized ads toggle — a lightweight opt-in/opt-out for ad personalization that works on any banner, without needing full IAB TCF.

Targeting

This tab decides where and to whom a given configuration applies:

• Languages — turn auto-detect on or off, and choose the default language used as a fallback. See the Languages guide for the full picture.

• Geo — set a default consent mode (Opt-in, Opt-out, or Off) for all visitors, then add per-country rules that override it — for example, opt-in for a list of EU country codes while the rest of the world gets a different default.

• A/B testing (Scale plan) — split visitors between two banner variants and measure the difference in opt-in rate.

Appearance

Covered in full in the Theming guide, but in short this tab holds brand and theme presets (Match my site, brand kits), the raw Custom CSS field, the mobile breakpoint slider, and the Pro white-label toggle that hides the "powered by" attribution.

Categories

Beyond the standard Necessary / Preferences / Statistics / Marketing set, define your own custom categories here:

1. Click Add category.

2. Give it a label and description visitors will see.

3. Set whether it's on by default or starts off.

4. Optionally choose a mapsTo value — Preferences, Statistics, Marketing, or none — so the category's consent state still drives blocking and Consent Mode signals the same way a standard category would, while showing your own wording to visitors.

5. Click Remove category on a row to delete a category you no longer need.

You can define up to 24 custom categories per property. This is exactly how the built-in GDPR and CCPA templates express their non-standard toggles — see the Templates guide if you want to see it in action before building your own.

Tips

• Behaviour and Appearance changes apply to the draft immediately, but nothing reaches visitors until you click Publish in the main toolbar — Settings isn't a separate save path.

• Paid features (TCF, white-label, A/B testing) stay visible but disabled, marked with a plan badge, until your organization's plan includes them — they're not hidden, just gated.

• If you rely on Re-ask after, remember it resets the clock from the visitor's last decision, not from when you changed the setting — a lower value won't immediately re-prompt everyone who already consented under a longer window.

• Turn on Observe cookies if you're not fully confident your cookie declaration is current — it's a low-effort way to keep it honest over time.