Cookie categories (also called purposes) are the units of consent in TruePrivacy. Visitors consent per category, the banner blocks or allows scripts per category, and the cookie declaration groups its table per category.
Cookie category management screen in the TruePrivacy dashboard

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Default categories

Every site starts with four standard categories:
CategoryConsent requiredTypical contents
NecessaryNo (always on)Session cookies, CSRF tokens, load balancing, consent state itself
PreferencesYesLanguage choice, region, UI settings
StatisticsYesGoogle Analytics, Matomo, heatmaps
MarketingYesMeta Pixel, ad retargeting, cross-site identifiers

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Creating and editing categories

1

Open category management

Go to Cookie Banner → Categories in the dashboard.
2

Create or edit

Click Add category for a custom purpose (for example, “Personalization” or “Social Media”), or edit an existing one. Set the display name, description, and translations. The description appears in the preference center, so write it for visitors, not lawyers.
3

Order and visibility

Drag to reorder how categories appear in the preference center. Categories with no mapped cookies can be hidden automatically.
The Necessary category cannot be deleted or made optional. Only place cookies there that are strictly required for the service the visitor requested — misclassifying analytics as “necessary” is a common audit finding.

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Mapping cookies to categories

Cookies detected by the cookie scanner are auto-classified using TruePrivacy’s tracker database. You can override any classification:
  1. Open Cookie Banner → Detected Cookies.
  2. Click a cookie and choose a category from the dropdown.
  3. The mapping is persisted and carried forward across rescans, so your manual corrections survive future scans.
The mapping drives three things simultaneously:
Review unmapped cookies after every scan. New third-party tags added by marketing teams are the most common source of unclassified trackers.