Privacy Shouldn’t be a Problem. Here’s Why
The ability to track and attribute conversions to individual users is fading in today’s privacy-focused world. However, contrary to popular belief, this shift isn’t necessarily bad for advertisers or ad platforms.
Privacy has divided opinions in adland. On one side are platforms, advertisers, and adtech companies that understand and respect the need for consumer privacy, and have embraced the opportunity to make advertising better. On the other, are those clinging on to user-level tracking, refusing to cave to privacy legislation for fear it would impact the effectiveness of ads regardless of consumer sentiment.
This division can even be seen at the top table. For instance, Apple’s approach has been full steam ahead for privacy, with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and Privacy Manifest. Yet its moves are not supported by other players. Other large platforms claim Apple’s strategies have significantly impacted advertisers. Although of course, the biggest consequence has been to their own ad revenue.
And talking of impacted revenue, Google’s U-turn on its long drawn out plan to deprecate third-party cookies has been scrapped, after it realised how drastically publishers’ CPMs may plummet as a result of diminished access to user-level data.
It is true that the ability to track and attribute conversions to an individual user is disappearing in a privacy world.
Yet, this isn’t a bad thing for advertisers or ad platforms, despite what the industry may have been led to believe.
Why advertising must be privacy-first
First up, the industry needs to acknowledge that privacy legislation has been introduced for a reason. Brands must accept this and work with vendors that are privacy-safe, otherwise they could find themselves in hot water with the very consumers they are trying to attract.
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The stumbling block for advertisers is their fear that they may miss out on some crucial piece of data that would help them better understand an individual user’s behaviour and how they could use this knowledge to convert them. But the industry needs to let go of its desire to track everything. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again; not only is this not ethical but even when using user-level tracking, it’s not possible. The truth is that an advertiser or adtech vendor can never truly know what is going on in the consumer’s mind when they view an ad.
In spite of Google’s cookie u-turn, privacy is here to stay and legislation is only likely to get stricter, as with the proposed US Federal Privacy Bill; support for which is gaining momentum. So if you’re an advertiser that isn’t using privacy-safe methods already, please be aware that privacy-first is the only way forward.
The loss of user-level tracking is no loss at all
Advertisers have been led to believe that user-level tracking is the only really accurate way of tracking consumers and measuring the success of ad campaigns. But this simply isn’t the case.
In fact, 70% of users already reject third-party cookies and 30% are not sharing user-level data. For advertisers to successfully track and target users requires the consumer to opt-in on both the publisher and advertiser side. And it’s simply not happening at a rate that would be conducive to effective advertising.
What this means is that adland is already a privacy-first ecosystem, and therefore it really doesn’t matter if Google deprecates the cookie or not, because even those still using third-party tracking won’t be reaching anything like the addressable audiences they used to.
Privacy has kick-started an improved ecosystem
While there’s no denying that privacy legislation has impeded advertisers ability to track and target users in the way they were used to, those willing to embrace privacy-safe solutions have discovered a better way of doing things.
Where previously advertisers relied on attribution informed by user-level data as the source of truth in how their advertising was performing, they’re now beginning to see that often it didn’t assign credit to the touchpoints that were most instrumental to driving success for their brand.
Technology is available however that enables marketers to target and measure campaigns successfully without the use of user-level data. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, savvy brands seeking to get the most out of their digital advertising are typically utilising a mix of methodologies including campaign level attribution, always on incrementality, and media mix modelling (MMM) and seeing unprecedented results.
Used together, these solutions provide brands with greater insights than ever before into how their advertising is performing, making the loss of user-level data a speck on the horizon rather than the catastrophe the industry was anticipating.
