Skip to content

Getting Started

Waulter is a hosted Consent Management Platform (CMP) that collects, stores, and signals user consent across your web properties. It ships as a lightweight JavaScript SDK that you deploy through Google Tag Manager or a direct script tag.

What you get

Capability Description
Consent Banner A fully customisable, GDPR-compliant consent banner that renders on your site and collects visitor consent decisions.
Preference Centre A detailed view where visitors can review and change their consent choices at any time.
Google Consent Mode v2 Automatic integration with GCM v2 — the SDK sets default denied signals on page load and updates them after the visitor decides.
Consent Statistics A dashboard showing consent rates, decision breakdowns, and visitor trends per configuration.
Policy Document Hosting Render versioned Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy documents directly on your pages — update text in the dashboard, no code deploy needed.
Scenario Targeting Serve different consent experiences based on URL patterns, user type, campaign, or any custom context.
Cross-Domain Consent User Sharing lets visitors consent once and have the decision honoured across your entire domain portfolio.

Who this documentation is for

Audience Start here
Developers integrating Waulter into a website Quick Start and Implementation Guides
Tag managers deploying via GTM GTM Implementation
DPOs / compliance officers configuring consent Dashboard and Purposes
Agency administrators managing client sites Agency Guide

How it works — at a glance

sequenceDiagram
    participant V as Visitor
    participant SDK as Waulter SDK
    participant GTM as Google Tag Manager
    participant G as Google Tags

    V->>SDK: Page loads
    SDK->>GTM: gtag('consent', 'default', { all: 'denied' })
    Note over G: Tags wait — consent not yet given
    SDK->>V: Consent banner appears
    V->>SDK: Clicks "Accept All"
    SDK->>GTM: gtag('consent', 'update', { analytics_storage: 'granted', ... })
    SDK->>GTM: dataLayer.push({ event: 'Waulter:Decision', decision: 'allow' })
    GTM->>G: Consent granted — tags fire
  1. The SDK loads and immediately sets all Google consent signals to denied.
  2. If the visitor has no stored consent, the banner appears.
  3. When the visitor makes a choice, the SDK updates consent signals and pushes a Waulter:Decision event to the data layer.
  4. Tags controlled by consent triggers fire (or remain blocked) accordingly.
  5. The consent decision is stored so returning visitors are not prompted again. The SDK persists consent in a first-party cookie (vaswaulter) and localStorage, and each interaction is recorded as a Permission Transaction — a unique, auditable proof-of-consent. See Waulter Cookies for full details on what is stored and for how long.

Overriding stored consent with Scenarios

By default, returning visitors with valid stored consent skip the banner entirely. However, you can override this using a Scenario with the forceStartCB flag — this forces the banner to appear again under conditions you define (e.g. after a policy update, for a specific URL pattern, or when purposes change). See Scenarios — forceStartCB for details, and Scenario-Driven Engagement for creative business use cases like whitepaper gates, loyalty programs, and post-purchase opt-ins.

Next steps

  • Quick Start

    Deploy a consent banner in 5 minutes via GTM.

    Quick Start

  • Key Concepts

    Learn the core vocabulary: configurations, purposes, scenarios, and consent signals.

    Concepts

  • SDK Reference

    Explore the public JavaScript API.

    SDK

  • Dashboard Guide

    Configure purposes, styling, texts, and compliance settings.

    Dashboard