Understanding Service Categories: Essential, Functional and Marketing

When the Website Scan detects the third-party services on your store, each service is assigned a category. Visitors give or refuse consent per category on the banner, so correct categorization is what makes your consent collection accurate.

The three categories

• Essential — required for the store and the consent solution itself to work (e.g. the Usercentrics Consent Management Platform). Always active; visitors cannot decline these.
• Functional — supports how the site works and remembers choices, without analytics or advertising tracking. Example: Shopify CDN, language preferences.
• Marketing — advertising technologies for ad targeting, remarketing and conversion measurement (e.g. Meta Pixel, Google Ads). Blocked until the visitor consents to Marketing.

Managing categories

1. Open the app and go to Third-Party Services.
2. Each service in "Your Services" shows its current category — use the dropdown next to it to change it.
3. The In Banner label means the service is presented to visitors; the checkbox includes/excludes it; Delete removes it.
4. Correct any miscategorisation: a Marketing technology classified as Essential would run without consent, and an Essential one classified as Marketing could break the store for visitors who decline.
5. Services the scan missed can be added manually with + Add Service.