Granular consent
Granular consent lets a visitor accept or refuse each purpose of processing separately, for example analytics but not advertising, instead of a single all-or-nothing choice.Specific consent is one of the four qualities of valid consent under the GDPR, and Recital 43 adds that consent is presumed not to be freely given if separate consents cannot be given for separate operations. Applied to cookies, this means a banner must let visitors choose by purpose. The usual categories are necessary (no choice, exempt), functional or preferences, analytics or statistics, and marketing or advertising; some banners add social media or personalization.
Granularity has a design rule attached. The EDPB's cookie banner task force confirmed in 2023 that pre-ticked boxes on the second layer are not valid consent, so every optional category must start off. A first layer with Accept all and Reject all, plus a Customize button to the per-category view, satisfies both the granular and the easy-refusal requirements; see the Reject all guide.
The IAB's Transparency and Consent Framework pushes granularity further, to individual purposes and vendors, which is why its banners are long. Google Consent Mode maps categories to its own signals: analytics storage to the analytics category, ad storage, ad user data and ad personalization to marketing. A consent record should store the categories accepted, not just the fact that the visitor clicked.