Important questions and answers
What happens to targeting for acquisition campaigns?
- Lower quality audiences
- Worse way to determine whether or not a given user has already been to the site
What happens to remarketing?
We assume that the size of the audience itself won’t be affected - this is because the user in this context may be associated with a first-party cookie. Either way, it may reduce the number of users we can target with the ad. That is - the number of users who have been on the site and, for example, viewed a product category will not change. Either way, the number of users we can show a remarketing ad to will probably decrease, because if that person did not come from the marketing platform’s domains, the platform has no way of connecting them to your site.
What happens to attribution in Google Analytics?
For attribution that doesn’t include Google signals or data-driven attribution - probably nothing.
When using Google Signals and Data-Driven attribution, there may be a decrease in accuracy, but we can’t tell yet whether we’ll even be able to detect it, since it’s already a pure black box.
How will we measure conversions after clicks and impressions?
The measurement of conversions after a click will remain the same as we described above. Ad clicks should still be associated with conversions using the Click ID, which is stored as a first-party cookie.
As we wrote earlier, without third-party cookies, it will be pretty much impossible to associate ad impressions in the content network. A way to make post-impression conversion measurement as accurate as possible is to send personal data to the platform. However, we may only have personal data available for certain conversions - typically a purchase or form submission.
In order for a given platform to be able to associate an impression with a conversion, it needs to link the personal data. And personal data is not always available on the platform side.
For example: if I’m in Safari and a Google banner ad pops up on a page, Google doesn’t have the ability to associate that impression with my subsequent conversion (unless, of course, I’m on Google domains like YouTube where I’m also logged in and subsequently send identical personal data with the conversion).
What will be the basis for the matching in each system? E.g. Sklik via email. Are we basically losing the entire REM audience of the unlogged? What about clients who don’t collect emails in any way?
We can’t yet assess exactly what effect this will have on REM audiences. But in any case, the number of people probablly will decrease, and it will be the worst in cases where we are not able to collect e-mail addresses.
What percentage of user information do you estimate we will lose?
That is impossible to estimate. This number depends on a large number of factors, such as the type of browser, the quality of the data collected, the specific platform, and so on.
Will this affect the performance of campaigns (SEA, PMAX)? Definitely yes, as there will be fewer signals that automated strategies take into account when bidding. Which all signals will be affected? E.g. search history should be OK, that’s basically 1st party data for Google, right?
Here it’s also tricky to estimate what impact this will have on the performance of these campaigns. A small clue could be if we are seeing worse campaign performance for users with Apple devices. Search history is really a 1st party information in a sense.
Estimates of how much data we lose vs. can we tell how many people are currently using ad blocker?
That’s basically impossible to say. It’s hard to know how many people are using an adblocker - it depends on the target audience, country, browser, etc.
Do I understand it correctly that we have not now collected audiences and measured conversions of users using Safari and Firefox?
No. The number of conversions measured depends on 1st party cookies - we have been collecting those and will continue to collect them (barring certain limitations). Audiences were certainly collected for both browsers as well, but the ability to target REM was probably limited to some extent.
Here’s where Apple users can ask themselves - did you/they see relevant advertising on Apple devices as well? I myself use both a Mac and an iPhone, and I have to say that I still see ads relevant to what I’m interested in. This is especially true for YouTube (where I’m logged in) and for Facebook.
