Implementing cookie consent in your help center

What's my plan?

Some jurisdictions may require that you obtain user consent for cookies or allow users to opt-out of cookies on your sites. For example, if you have enabled Google Analytics cookies in your help center, you may be required to allow users to opt-out of those cookies, including through the use of a universal opt-out mechanism.

This article covers the following topics:

• Setting up a third party cookie consent service
• Universal opt-outs with Global Privacy Control (GPC)

Setting up a third party cookie consent service

To enable your users to set their own cookie preferences, you must use a third-party cookie consent service (CCS) to apply cookie consent options on your help center. If end users choose to block cookies, they may have a degraded user experience.

If you are using a theme from the Theme Marketplace, then it must have a Developer license. For more information about theming, see Using Guide themes from the Zendesk Marketplace.

Note: Zendesk does not accept any liability for your use of any CCS. Your use of such non-Zendesk services is subject to the terms, conditions and functionality of the CCS provider.

To set up a third party cookie consent service

Note: This procedure assumes you are using the theme editor within your help center. If you are using your own development tools to edit your theme locally, skip steps 2-4 and refer to Working on a theme locally for Guide Professional and Enterprise for how to access and edit your theme code.

1. Choose a third-party cookie consent management platform, such as Cookiebot, TrustArc, or OneTrust and follow their instructions.
2. In your Guide help center, click the Customize design icon.
3. On the Themes page, click Customize on the theme you want to add the cookie consent option to.
4. On the page of the theme, click Edit code.
5. Follow the instructions of the CCS and implement the Javascript snippets that they provided.

   Instructions may vary between services. Generally, you must add the code within the head tag. You do that by adding the additional JavaScript snippets provided by a third-party cookie consent management platform to the document_head.hbs template. This teamplate contains anything within the head tag.

   If you have one or more analytics snippets in the document_head.hbs (such as Google Analytics) you should add your cookie consent snippet above the analytics snippets.

6. Using the instructions of the CCS, configure the code to control all Guide cookies, and local storage that is not listed as "Strictly necessary" on the Zendesk cookie list.

Universal opt-outs with Global Privacy Control (GPC)

Global Privacy Control (GPC) is a browser setting that notifies websites of a user's privacy preferences, including with respect to third-party cookies, by sending a signal to each website a user visits. Unlike cookie consent, a user’s GPC signal applies across different websites. Some laws require website operators to respect GPC signals, even when they might conflict with a user’s cookie consent on a particular website.

Often, CCS providers also offer GPC tools to allow you to respect GPC signals.