Video: The Future of Measurement in a Changing Ecosystem

New privacy regulations present new challenges to our ability to track the customer journey. Here's Google's vision.
SIA Team
October 26, 2021

If you’re a deep advertiser and marketer who likes to track each step of your customer journey, you probably have a robust marketing process in place.

But, throughout the years, you’ve probably felt the squeeze of government and privacy restrictions. 

These restrictions have led to the development of compliance notices/banners, the gradual decline of cookies, and the growth of AI-based data modeling are 3 things that come to mind when this issue is brought up.

That said, increased transparency is good for the consumer–your visitors. A lot of them want to be reassured that you have solid privacy measures in place. 

And, where you may use their information, such as collecting their email addresses or using cookies, compliance statements may be used. 

(I’m sure you’ve seen many websites where, once you land on a page, have a small banner at the top or bottom that has a cookie statement and an OK button. Perhaps your site has one of these.)

But, what does the future hold for advertisers? 

A recent Tweet leads to a video that gives some insight. 

Here’s the video:

So, if you want to see where Google’s headed with these changes, the video above gives you a clue as to what Google’s vision is. 

The video is hosted by Namrata Chakrabarti, the Global Product Lead for Conversion Measurement at Google.

Tags Firing in a ‘Consent-Aware’ Manner

Namrata said, “For one, with the increasing need for transparency and control, consent banners will become common across regions, and the importance of tools that help tags fire in a content-aware manner will increase.”

She continued: 

“Secondly, cookies and their device identifiers will continue to degrade, and the industry will move to more aggregated and anonymized measurement and data collection. 

“Finally, the ceiling of observable conversions will continue to decrease, increasing the reliance on conversion modeling to provide comprehensive measurement reporting. 

Three Strategic Pillars

“To provide a better foundation for measurement in his new world, Google is focused on investing in building new durable privacy-preserving solutions within three strategic pillars.

“The first is to reserve your existing measurement infrastructure… 

“So we will have to depend on cookies in the short term while meeting users’ privacy requirements and abiding by regulatory guidance. 

“The next pillar is to…enable comprehensive modeling. All solutions within this pillar help provide us with additional signals to fill measurement gaps. 

“And lastly, secure your data through additional controls in data storage, and invest in privacy-preserving technology.”

Namrata went on to give more examples of how tools like Google Tag Manager, along with emerging techniques such as server-side tagging and data modeling can help fill in the data gaps that result from increased restrictions. 

Source: Google Analytics Twitter channel