Cookie and Consent Management

Gradual’s tenant-level cookie management feature allows you to collect and manage cookie consent across your public-facing pages. Visitors can accept all cookies, reject optional cookies, or choose which cookie categories they want to allow. Tenant admins can configure the cookie policy link and manage how privacy choices appear across the site. Gradual also supports privacy-safe analytics on public pages before a visitor makes a consent choice. This allows core site measurement to continue while optional cookie categories remain subject to consent.

If you use a third party service to handle cookie consent management, please refer to our integration documentation for our native Ketch and OneTrust integrations.

Tenant admins can manage cookie consent from: Settings > Community > Legal & Policy Settings. In the Cookie Policy section, select Edit to open the configuration window.

From there, you can edit:

For all cookie preference defaults, the default setting is ON.
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These default settings control the initial on/off state shown to first-time visitors in the cookie preferences panel. The configured cookie policy link appears in the active cookie consent experience so visitors can review your policy directly from the site. This is where the cookie policy link and the category defaults are set. The wording and appearance of the banner and preferences window are configured separately, in Customization > Widgets & Nudges.

Visitors see a cookie banner the first time they land on a public-facing page on your tenant site, including the public event ticket selection page, unless consent has already been recorded.

The banner includes:

The banner’s position, colors and wording can be customized — see Customize the cookie banner and preferences window below.

If the visitor selects Accept all, Gradual records consent for all enabled cookie categories.
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If the visitor selects Reject all, Gradual records consent for essential cookies only.
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If the visitor selects Manage preferences, Gradual opens the cookie preferences panel so the visitor can choose categories individually. For first-time visitors, the panel uses the tenant’s configured default states for Analytics, Functional, and Marketing cookies. For returning visitors, the panel shows their saved choices.

If using a third-party provider, Gradual displays the service consent banner instead.
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Optional cookies do not load until the visitor gives consent, even if a cookie category appears on by default in the preferences panel. Gradual may still collect limited, non-identifying analytics needed to measure site activity before a visitor makes a consent choice. This measurement does not enable optional cookies or marketing tracking.

Visitors can open the cookie preferences panel from the cookie banner or by selecting Your privacy choices in the site footer. If using a third party management ool, the Your privacy choices opens the service-specific preference center.

The panel displays the cookie categories available for that tenant. For first-time visitors, the default on/off state for Analytics, Functional, and Marketing cookies is set by the tenant admin. Visitors can then:

Necessary cookies support core platform functions such as login, security, and session management.

These cookies are always active and cannot be turned off.

Analytics cookies support richer analytics features, including analytics that rely on persistent browser storage. Visitors can turn this category on or off. Even if a visitor leaves Analytics cookies off, Gradual can still measure basic site activity using privacy-safe analytics that do not rely on optional cookies.

Functional cookies support enhanced experiences such as saved preferences and embedded features. Visitors can turn this category on or off.

Marketing cookies support marketing measurement and promotional tracking. Visitors can turn this category on or off.

Admins can change the wording and appearance of the cookie banner and the cookie preferences window. Both are edited from Customization > Widgets & Nudges, where Cookie Consent and Cookie Preferences each have a preview and an Edit button.

Neither can be switched off from here. The banner and the preferences window are part of how consent is collected, so what you change is how they look and what they say, not whether they appear. Changes take effect on your site shortly after you select Publish.

You can edit:

You can edit:

The cookie category names, their descriptions, and the button labels cannot be edited. These come from your cookie policy settings so that what a visitor consents to always matches what your policy says.

Each section of each editor has its own Reset to Default, so you can undo the styling without losing your custom copy, or the reverse. A section’s reset is unavailable until you have changed something in it.

Gradual provides the default banner and window text in every language your community supports. Custom copy replaces that text in all languages — it is not translated per language, so a visitor reading your site in another language sees the text exactly as you wrote it.

If you would rather every visitor see the text in their own language, use Reset to Default on the Copy section. The translated default text returns.

The banner and preferences window are the first thing a visitor interacts with, and some of them will be using a screen reader or a high-contrast display. When choosing text and background colors, pick a combination with strong contrast — the editor links to the WCAG accessibility guidelines for reference.

All tenant sites include a Your privacy choices item in the footer.
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This gives visitors a consistent way to revisit and update their privacy choices after their initial selection. The footer item also includes the CCPA opt-out icon.

The behavior of this link depends on the active consent provider:

The display name for this footer item can be customized, but the item remains part of the footer experience across tenant sites.

When a visitor makes a selection through Accept all, Reject all, or Save preferences, Gradual stores a consent record. That record controls optional cookie categories and any consent-based analytics or marketing behavior going forward.

That record includes:

Consent expires after 12 months. Once it expires, Gradual treats the visitor as a first-time visitor and shows the banner again.

Gradual also prompts for consent again if:

Gradual blocks non-essential scripts that rely on consent by default until consent is granted. Privacy-safe site analytics can still run without optional cookies so Gradual can measure basic activity on public pages.

After a visitor saves their choice:

If using a third-party consent management tool, Gradual applies that service's consent signals to its own scripts and updates script behavior when a visitor changes preferences in that service's experience.

If a visitor updates their preferences later, the updated choice applies going forward. A page reload may be needed before all script changes fully take effect. If a visitor turns off Analytics or Marketing cookies later, Gradual stops using those consent-based behaviors from that point forward.

If the active third-party provider script does not initialize on a live page, Gradual falls back to the native cookie banner.

The cookie banner and cookie preferences panel are designed for both desktop and mobile experiences. They also support keyboard navigation and screen reader access.