Cookie categories let you group cookies by their purpose, giving your visitors granular control over which types of cookies they accept. The categories you define appear in the banner's preferences modal, where each category has its own toggle switch.
Default Categories
Every new site starts with four default categories:
- Necessary - cookies required for the basic functioning of your website, such as session cookies and CSRF tokens. This category is always active and cannot be toggled off by visitors.
- Analytics - cookies used to measure website traffic and visitor behaviour, such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Matomo.
- Marketing - cookies used for advertising, retargeting, and tracking across websites, such as Facebook Pixel, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Insight.
- Functional - cookies that enable enhanced functionality like chat widgets, embedded videos, and personalisation features.
Necessary Is Always Active
The Necessary category cannot be disabled by visitors. Its toggle is permanently on and greyed out in the preferences modal. This ensures that essential cookies required for your site to function are never blocked.
When assigning cookies to categories, only place cookies in Necessary if they are genuinely required for core functionality. Misclassifying marketing or analytics cookies as necessary may violate GDPR requirements.
Important: Data protection authorities may audit your cookie classifications. Make sure every cookie in the Necessary category has a legitimate, functional purpose.
Managing Categories
Navigate to your site's Cookies & Scripts page. The Categories & Cookies tab shows all your categories with the cookies assigned to each one.
Creating a New Category
Click Add Category and provide a name and description. The name appears in the preferences modal heading, and the description explains to visitors what cookies in this category are used for.
Editing a Category
Click on any category to expand it and edit the name, description, or reorder cookies within it.
Assigning Cookies to Categories
After running a cookie scan, discovered cookies are automatically categorised by the auto-categorisation engine. Cookies that the engine cannot classify are flagged as uncategorised.
Manual Categorisation
For uncategorised cookies, you have two options:
- Quick-categorise buttons - the uncategorised cookie notification shows each cookie name with category buttons for one-click assignment.
- Bulk categorise - select multiple cookies and move them to a category in one operation.
Once a cookie is manually categorised, it is marked as is_manually_categorized. Future scan runs will not override your manual assignment, even if the auto-categoriser would classify it differently.
Translating Category Names
Category names and descriptions can be translated into each of your enabled languages. In the Banner Editor Texts tab, expand any language to find the category text fields. When auto-translate is enabled, built-in translations are used as a base, and your custom text overrides them.
How Categories Appear in the Banner
In the preferences modal, each category is displayed as an expandable accordion row with:
- A coloured dot matching the category.
- The category name.
- A badge showing the number of cookies in that category.
- A toggle switch to accept or reject that category.
- An expand chevron that reveals a table of individual cookies with their name, domain, and description.
Category Limits
All plans support unlimited cookie categories. There is no restriction on how many categories you can create.