Navigating the Privacy Reforms:

In the upcoming 12 months, we will focus on delving deeper into the forthcoming privacy reforms and their impact on Customer Data and the Marketing technology ecosystem.

Businesses must navigate the intricate balance between safeguarding consumer privacy while ensuring marketing effectiveness and personalisation. The evolving landscape and global platforms' approaches to privacy within their ecosystems will reshape nearly everything from tracking and analysing web activity and campaign effectiveness to how we engage with customers throughout their lifecycle with our businesses.

The Customer Data Institute invites you to actively contribute and engage in this ongoing conversation to foster a comprehensive understanding of these dynamics. Our platform will feature a series of blogs, interviews, and podcasts where we engage with experts from diverse fields. Together, we aim to explore the profound impacts on businesses and collaboratively seek potential solutions to navigate these transformative shifts.?

Join us on this educational journey as we navigate the evolving terrain of consumer privacy and its implications on marketing strategies.

In part one of the series, we look at the impact that global privacy laws already have on businesses trying to accurately track the performance of their websites, marketing activity and onsite customer experience.?

Rescuing Lost Data: Navigating Analytics Challenges in the Era of Adblockers, VPNs, and Secure Browsers

Even before the recent iOS 17 release, private browsing, ad blockers, and VPN use have significantly impacted cross-site tracking and on-page conversion and analytics.?

According to our first guest in this series, Tim Pointer, up to 35% of your analytics could be lost due to signal loss, and at least 16% of your media spend will never convert due to blocked data alone.

Tim founded a global software business out of NZ, RescueMetrics, which has built a solution that registers the disruptions caused by adblockers, VPNs, and secure browsers.

We enjoyed chatting with Tim this afternoon and learning about the impact of data losses on businesses today.?

Q: Tim, thanks for joining us today. I'd like to start with a quick overview of the market challenge you're trying to solve.?

A: Businesses are in bidding wars to capture online engagement. Each dollar spent is precious, but without accurate data – planning activity can look more like gambling.

We want to ensure businesses can maintain visibility over performance data while ensuring they can comply with privacy and data collection laws.?

Q: IOS updates and evolving privacy measures continue to impact businesses here in AUNZ. How can these changes affect online user tracking, and what potential pitfalls do marketers face?

A: The measures introduce complexities in online user tracking. Marketers may face inaccurate channel attribution and performance metrics, leading to a potential decline in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).?

The lack of awareness regarding these changes can result in misguided decision-making, with businesses possibly turning off successful campaigns due to inaccurately tracked performance.

Q: You mentioned the impact on ROAS and tracking, but I assume these gaps in data will also impact the effectiveness of the rest of your marketing stack and potentially even the ML/AI models you are using to predict purchase behaviour.?

A: The erosion of data quality jeopardises the accuracy of your entire MarTech stack, including the measurement models underpinning them. This applies to Attribution, Predictive models, and the broader AdTech stack. All these platforms need a quality data signal to deliver value

Q: This is not a new issue; the first time we saw this pop-up was with Safari and Firefox starting to block 3rd party cookies in 2013. Since then, the most commonly suggested solution has been moving to 1st-party data, specifically server-side tagging. You have suggested this is not quite the silver bullet it promises to be.?

A: There is a widespread misconception that server-side tracking will help solve tracking prevention challenges.

Unfortunately, server-side tracking solutions rarely make a dent in resolving marketing analytic quality and accuracy issues.

Tracking prevention disruptions occur within a user's browser. While popular server-side setups may ensure the last leg of the tracking journey is a server-to-server, most data points will still be sourced client-side. As a result, this makes these setups just as vulnerable to tracking preventions as the client-side setups we were used to.

Q: So how does RescueMetrics address these issues

A: RescueMetrics resolves the problem inside the browser itself. Our technology dynamically converts existing client-side setups into server-side data collection – explicitly engineered to avoid browser disruption.

So essentially, if RescueMetrics detects an error against any of the tags tracking on the client website, we dynamically refire that tag as a server-side tag and resend the data to the correlating platform.

Q: How does this help marketers gain transparency on the missing data, and what platforms does it cover?

A: We record those error messages on your existing site tags and generate a report detailing the extent of data loss. We cover over 30 platforms, including the most popular, which provides a comprehensive view of overall data discrepancies and discrepancies by individual platforms so you can start making informed decisions.

Q: You mentioned some pretty alarming data discrepancies: up to 35% of your analytics could be lost due to signal loss, and at least 16% of your media spend will never convert due to blocked data alone. How can marketers assess the impact of tracking preventions on their conversions and analytics??

A: The suggested analyses include comparing the central analytics platform (likely Google Analytics) with CRM data, analysing website visitor stats and ROAS, and comparing Ad clicks versus Sessions from Ad campaigns. While these analyses may provide a partial picture, they serve as a starting point to identify potential discrepancies and understand the impact of tracking preventions on decision-making quality.

Q: OK, so last question: how does this affect compliance with current privacy laws? I am talking about the more progressive GDPR and CCPA policies, which will likely represent what Australian businesses will need to comply with based on the proposed Australian data privacy reforms.?

A: RescueMetrics does not require any updates to your existing privacy policies. All data processing happens inside your existing platforms, so long as privacy standards are being met throughout your MarTech stack, there are no additional obligations to consider. We are also GDPR and CCPA compliant, with all user data being anonymised inside RescueMetrics and then erased from our server once secured inside your platforms. You can also integrate your cookie management platforms to ensure that policies controlling user tracking are followed.

Conclusion

The evolving landscape of privacy laws and the growing use of Ad blockers and private browsers will significantly impact the quality of your data and necessitate proactive measures.?

As we will discover, with almost every aspect of the evolving ecosystem, the motivation to act will be driven by more than just the opportunity of gains but also the very real and significant potential cost of inaction and failing to meet the new proposed privacy principles and standards.?

About the Contributors

Simon Pereira is the current CEO of the Customer Data Institute and co-founder of the Wondaris CDP, with over 25 years of Media, sales and marketing experience and 15+ years as an Executive leader in Marketing Technology, Analytics and Customer Data businesses.

Tim Pointer is a former NZ Forbes 30 under 30 for Marketing and Advertising with 15+ years in the digital advertising industry. Co-founder of one of NZ's largest digital advertising agencies, Reason and Founder of RescueMetrics.com