We all know the speed at which marketing strategies need to adapt and change to keep up with the digital landscape, but the myriad of changes to privacy and tracking in recent months present interesting challenges for clients and agencies alike, says Extreme‘s Mark Gledhill.
What has changed?
It won’t have escaped your attention that the ability to track users on websites, social media, via emails you send, and the third-party websites they visit has been steadily eroding. This is due to privacy legislation brought in by governments and economic bodies, alongside more voluntary changes from corporations like Apple.
Apple’s actions on privacy in iOS appear more customer-focused than those taken by their big tech rivals. This occurred because of growing unrest and demand from consumers for greater privacy when using the web. When it comes to the world of e-commerce, nearly 70 per cent of respondents in a Wyngg study said they have abandoned purchases because they didn’t trust the way their data would be handled.
What do the changes mean?
As well as mobile device tracking permissions, possibly the most impactful of changes to UK and EU businesses have been caused by the GDPR cookie directives, which mean that tracking and analytics cookies cannot be set on a website unless users give their explicit consent.
If users ignore the consent pop up, (or choose to actively decline unnecessary cookies) marketing cookies like those used by Google Analytics cookies cannot be set and the tracking code cannot be fired. These users are invisible to GA, meaning they don’t contribute to visitor numbers, conversions, sales analytics, channel attribution and so on. This means that if you’re using cookie consent correctly, your GA or similar tracking method is definitely underreporting.
Put simply, the old ways of reporting are dead. These changes are here to stay and their impact will slowly increase across multiple channels, so the time to act and get ahead is now. It’s vital that we educate clients and prepare them for a very different reporting structure moving forward.
Navigating the new (private) world
All is not lost, strategies simply need reworking and reporting methods need to adapt to this new – and lasting – way of working. Focusing on overall sales uplift over looking at individual channel attribution, for example, is a better way of showing that your activity is working, and you will need to accept a less granular report structure.
How to respond
- Ensure your GA is set up correctly
- Explore GDPR compliant tools to bridge the data gap
- Focus on zero and first-party data
- Understand the path to purchase (not everyone is ready to purchase now)
- Re-adjust your KPIs to these new ways of working
Want to know more in-depth ways to manage your strategy and deliver value under new privacy and tracking rules? Download Extreme’s whitepaper: Adapting to Change – How to Manage Privacy and Tracking in 2022 and beyond.
