Will you have cookies? New rules for websites can really complicate things for you
Marketing
26. 05. 2026
Klára Bečáková
The rules for storing cookies on your website or e-shop will change starting January 1, 2022. A new legislation comes into effect, and you will only be able to collect "cookies" with the consent of visitors.
Whether you have a website, an e-shop, or even a customer portal, you have surely heard about cookies and their collection. A cookie is a text file that collects all data about the device (phone, tablet, or laptop) of visitors to your site.
Thanks to cookies, you can better understand your customers. Through basic cookies, the website records customers' IP addresses and screen resolutions. Another type of cookie remembers, for example, whether you speak Czech.
Thanks to this, you can:
improve the functionality of your website
measure traffic and create reports on visitor traffic and behavior on the website/e-shop
But besides these purposes, there are also remarketing, marketing, and analytical cookies. These store information about how long a customer stays on the page and where they come from.
They can:
serve marketing purposes
target ads more effectively so that you show people offers that will genuinely interest them
Opt-out rule: if I do not express explicit disagreement, my consent automatically applies Opt-in rule: if I do not express my explicit consent, my disagreement automatically applies
What can we do now and what will change?
We are moving from opt-out rules to opt-in. Today, you are still accustomed to cookies being stored automatically on your website/e-shop. To avoid collecting information about customers, explicit consent was necessary – the so-called opt-out rules were used. However, this will come to an end with the conclusion of this year. In mid-September 2021, the government approved an amendment to the law that will change these rules.
Visitors to the website/e-shop will now encounter a pop-up bar with options – the so-called opt-in rule. They will be able to consciously choose what information they provide about themselves. In the European Union, this is already an established standard, but for us, it will be a novelty. If a customer visits your website/e-shop from January 1, 2022, the only thing that should be stored automatically are technical cookies that ensure the basic functionality of the entire website/e-shop. All other cookies require active consent from the visitor.
Three Pitfalls of Cookie Banners
Forget about any tricks that would make this cookie banner obligation easier for you. Steer clear of these three tactics, which could ultimately cost you dearly:
Inactive: consent for cookies must not be pre-filled.
Unfree: the so-called cookie wall, which enforces consent by preventing visitors from accessing the site until they check it.
Uninformed: insufficient provision of information about cookies (what cookies, technologies, who will have access to them, for what purposes, etc.).
What impact will the changes have?
The new rules will certainly affect the relevance of the data measured in Google Analytics and other tools used for analyzing your website/e-shop. At this moment, you can generally expect a measurement inaccuracy of about 10%. This means that if 100 people actually visit your website, you will have a record of 90 of them in Google Analytics (the reason for this discrepancy is, for example, the use of various AdBlockers by users).
With the introduction of the amendment, we expect an increase in data measurement incompleteness of about 10–50%, which will significantly impact the way analytical and marketing data is collected and evaluated.
