Privacy is eating my data - what can I do?

Hi everyone,

I've talked a bit about how the increased demand for privacy and transparency from consumers has driven a lot of legislative changes around the world (GDPR, CCPA) and technological changes (iOS email blocking,?Chrome/Safari?updates). As marketers, we'll be losing efficacy in terms of our current tracking/targeting options.

So the question is, what can we do about this?

Google's response to increasing privacy?

Google have a three-pronged response to the lack of data:

• GA4 Analytics update in?machine learning, AI & data modelling
• Investment in?alternative tracking technology
• Attribution model being moved by default to data-driven attribution

Since they are not going to be seeing as much data come through, Google is focused on building out the machine learning and data-driven attribution models used in Google Analytics and Google Ads.

What does this mean??

Google is going to make up for the lack of data in conversions and users by increasing the depth of analysis of the data that it does get. The data modelling might include which ads visitors saw, which order they clicked ads in, how they interacted with your website, what other websites they saw your ads on, etc. To analyse a larger amount of data takes a much higher level of sophistication in terms of machine learning and AI.

Why does it matter? What can we do??

As a consumer, I'm happy that there are going to be increased privacy protections for us all. But as a marketer, particularly one that works in digital, it'll make that job harder. But we can do something about it.

1. Meaningful conversion tracking: It is critical to ensure that the actions that we are tracking on our websites are significant to the business i.e. there are conversions on your sites that are?meaningful?to your organisation. Whether you use Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Hubspot or Facebook, ensuring Alignment between what you track and your real-world business objectives is key.
2. Schema implementation: Increasing the amount of information that we can give to search engines (Google) becomes much more valuable as they use that?information for modelling and search results in future. So ensuring your schema is up to date and fully utilised on your website will become more important as that data is also incorporated into your ad campaigns.
3. Reviewing Google Ads structure: How we structure ad campaigns will evolve. Previously we wanted to break down our advertising into tight specific ads and keywords, now we see better results by aggregating a lot of the split up ad groups so that the bidding strategies have more data to work with.

We are going through a period of increasing change in so many areas, but there is also a lot of opportunities. I can't wait to see what's around the corner. Apart from more Covid - stuff that.

Best

Kim

(Plug) I'd recommendour Google Analytics eBook because the first chapter is all about ensuring that alignment from your business goals to the actions on the website.