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60% of the entire population will be covered by modern GDPR legislation next year. This requires new and privacy-friendly tracking methods. Today was Google Marketing Live: the annual event where all product innovations for companies are presented. In this short post, I will tell you more about all the updates related to tracking.
Looking for the correct and legal way of tracking
For years, Google, together with the community, has been looking for a well-functioning and privacy-friendly way to perform measurements on its users. A lot of initiatives have already been conceived and also forgotten. It remains difficult to come up with something to continue to provide the same performance for advertisers, without collecting personal data. What Google now seems to be really moving forward with is the Topics API. You can read a short summary about what that is in a post on this blog.
‘My Ad Center’
Google users will soon get a way to easily manage your displayed ads. This option already existed, but was always hidden far in your account settings and seems to be getting more user-friendly.
At first glance, it looks like you’ll be given the following options to manage ads displayed within your Google account:
- Option to disable measurements across platforms: web & app activity, location history and YouTube history. There is a good chance that more will be added later.
- Option to automatically delete your data after a certain period. Think of 3 or, for example, 18 months. They are also kind enough to give you the option to have all your data stored on their servers indefinitely.
- Option to serve more advertisements within certain ‘topics’ or from advertisers that you find interesting.
- Option to enable or disable sensitive categories such as gambling sites or dating apps.
- Ability to view personal information. Here you will find your gender, age, mother tongue, expected relationship status and so on.
Ultimately, it seems that the tech giant is being forced by new legislation to make this more clearly public. They themselves indicate that this is a good way to be open and to earn more trust from their billions of users.
All functionalities can still change. It is also not yet clear when ‘My Ad Center’ will be released publicly.
More tests with interest-based advertising and remarketing
It is becoming increasingly important to test how advertisements will be served when Google switches to using the Topics API for privacy-friendly tracking. A new option has therefore been added in Ads to increase your bids for new customers, instead of for existing customers. This is all based on first-party data, and that’s what they want to use for privacy-friendly tracking. It has now been added for Performance Max campaigns and will be added to others later.
Google improves its ‘Marketing mix modeling’
Google has been using this for quite some time now. They are different models that are privacy-friendly and work on different platforms such as YouTube and streaming to TVs. These models come from different parties. Think of Ekimetrics, Nielsen or Neustar. The insights from this are used to improve your marketing, for example by shifting or increasing budget, or taking more into account discounts of your products. (More info on their blog)
Updates to Data-driven attribution (DDA)
With data-driven attribution, conversion credit is allocated based on how people interact with your various ads and how they decide to become a customer of yours. This model uses the data in the account to determine which campaigns, ads, and keywords have the greatest impact on your goals. Earlier this year, Google already made DDA available to everyone, regardless of your number of conversions. Now this is set as the default attribution model.
On-device convert measurements
A new Firebase SDK version was recently released to measure conversions within an app, without collecting personal data. The customer data cannot be viewed by the maker of the app, nor by the advertiser. There are no external servers, not even Google’s, that collect or store data.
Bye bye gtag.js, Hello Google tag
The implementation of tags had to be simplified. Google knew that, but every marketer knows that too. The Google tag replaces the current ‘Global site tag’ and together includes Google Ads and Google Analytics 4. This gives you the possibility to manage the settings in one place in Google Ads, without programming yourself. It seems (from the screenshots) that you can easily import the ability to automate events, such as clicks, scrolls, and pageviews, as conversions. This will be explained in more detail in upcoming webinars.
This will save a huge amount of time setting up conversions for small accounts. As a result, the results will ultimately be better.
Import your leads and measure even more through ‘Enhanced conversions’
Later this year, Google will add an option to import your leads into Ads to make the funnel even clearer in the reports. This gives you even more info on how qualified and converted leads behave. The best part is that this makes it even easier for you to automate bidding based on the value of the leads.
A big step
Here you go – this was a brief summary of Google’s 2022 tagging updates. It should become even clearer in the upcoming webinars how the updates can be deployed and what Google expects from us. You can see they’re really focusing on making privacy-friendly tracking and tagging possible.
Now available: conversion modeling update, data-driven attribution as default, on-device conversion measurement.
Coming soon: ‘My Ad Center’, MMM improvements, Google Tag, import of leads for improved conversions and the funnel reporting.
If you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you!
