As concerns about privacy and information sharing rise from everyday consumers alongside the need for personal and trending information from advertisers, Google has had to adapt and create changes for its ad privacy policy, and not without turmoil. Recently, Google responded to opposing forces of information and privacy through several changes with a generally mixed response. Following is what you should know about the Google ad changes relating to data privacy.
The Google Ad Changes That Have Been Made To The Privacy Policy
In May of 2021, Google announced new privacy controls intended to provide users with the ability to share and protect their personal information to the extent that they felt most comfortable by allowing users to determine who has access to their personal data. A new password management system was introduced, as well as users gained the authority to delete the last fifteen minutes of their search history.
For years, third-party cookies have been used without user permission (or knowledge) to track activity and collect data; however, as companies like Google enact privacy policy changes for their customers, third-party cookies tracking has quickly become a thing of the past. Before Google, several companies began using privacy and respect for their users as a selling tool leading Google to follow suit.
The upside of enacting proper security measures is the comfort and trust of consumers. However, as a business that works primarily through ads and marketing, advertisers require a method to track what users do after viewing an ad. The changes Google has made for their ads and privacy policy have no doubt hindered an advertisers’ ability to track online behaviour to use to promote and/or sell products and services.
How These Changes Will Affect Digital Marketing
The changes that Google has made to their privacy policy will affect digital marketing fairly significantly in unforeseen ways. Essentially, due to these changes in policy, remarketing, or creating personalized ads to users who previously visited a web page will no longer exist, or if it does continue to exist, it will have to take a different approach, hopefully adapting to the new privacy policy.
As digital marketing is a data-driven industry, of course, the exclusion or restriction of certain key data will cause heads to spin. You may be wondering, what data will we use if not through remarketing? If this year, big brands do not carry out a data collection strategy, they will surely lose competitive advantage as well as relevancy to their customers.
Solution? Enhanced Conversions
While it’s true that users can take advantage of the new Google ad changes by opting out of certain cookies that enable conversion tracking, Google has come up with an innovative solution to continue digital marketing and data collection: enhanced conversions. Enhanced conversions require first-party data (name, email, home address, phone number). While customers will provide that information as part of the conversion, they can also opt-out of having that information used for marketing purposes.
In the instance that the customer chooses to opt-out of having their information used for marketing purposes, your conversion tracking system will automatically collect the data and pass it to Google for analysis. Google can then anonymize the conversion data to use for digital marketing.
As Vidhya Srinivasan, the VP/GM of Buying, Analytics and Measurement for Google Ads explained: “We’re here to help you succeed in a world with fewer cookies and other identifiers with new ways to respect user consent, measure conversions and unlock granular insights from your sites and apps.” Enhanced conversion takes a while to begin to work, once it’s set up, Google will collect data for up to 75 days before you’ll have access to enhanced insights.
While these changes may feel overwhelming, there are more exciting and helpful developments coming soon. As more users opt-out of having their data collected, it could become increasingly difficult to gain access to the analytics essential to online advertising. But not to worry, Vidhya Srinivasan explains further by saying “Soon, we’ll extend Google’s advanced machine learning models to behavioural reporting in Analytics. For example, if there is incomplete data in your User Acquisition report due to cookies not being available, we’ll now use modelling to help fill gaps for a more complete view of the number of new users your campaigns have acquired.”
Understanding your customer journey is vital and It’s not only possible to get conversion data while respecting user privacy; it’s necessary.
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