What is the future of measurement in the Privacy-Led Marketing era?

There isn’t much about digital marketing that isn’t rapidly evolving. Everything from what data marketers can collect, through how they analyze it to improve performance. It can be overwhelming. But while some types of data and how we use them are going away, there are new technologies and better data sources available to digital marketers. Putting them to work can lead to stronger customer relationships and better long-term performance.

We can get to know our customers, their actions, and their preferences better than ever before, which leads to more accurate measurement. Your customers increasingly know the value of their data and their privacy rights. Smart marketing strategy has to work with customers and prospects to track their preferences and actions instead of trying to get around them.

Once consent has been obtained and the campaigns have been run, then what? How do we turn consented marketing data, aggregate sources, and other information into performance analysis and useful insights? Read on, as we look at new strategies in digital marketing that result in better data, new and evolving solutions for measurement, and more.

What is the impact of privacy regulations on the future of digital measurement?

At this point, marketers are no strangers to data privacy regulation. With the continuing spread of new laws across geographies and industries, the biggest challenge is how to best balance legal compliance with successful marketing operations for sustainable growth.

Perhaps your company needs to comply with one or more global privacy laws. Perhaps you also need to meet the requirements of companies like Google in order to maintain full access to advertising and analytics. When you need user consent, how do you obtain it consistently and maintain great user experience across channels? All while committing to data minimization principles?

Here are a few ways that regulation of marketing data privacy is shaping the future of measurement.

Privacy compliance and mitigating risks

Everyone has seen the headlines by now, where big tech companies have been hit with massive fines for privacy compliance violations. Your company may not be in that league, but authorities are ramping up enforcement broadly. In addition to fines, penalties can include suspension of marketing operations, deletion of data, and resource-intensive requirements to comply with audits.

Loss of brand reputation can also result in existing customers taking their business elsewhere, and difficulty attracting new ones, as well as advertisers, investors, or other valuable partners choosing more trustworthy companies.

All of these things can severely hamper your company’s ability to do business short- and long-term and threaten its sustainability. If you can’t do much marketing, there won’t be much to measure.

It’s worth investing in privacy compliance solutions like a consent management platform such as Usercentrics CMP now, to enable peace of mind regarding achieving and maintaining privacy compliance while you focus on evolving your marketing strategies for greater success.

Increased transparency with customers and earning trust

An increased requirement for transparency with customers is partly from consumer demand and partly a regulatory stipulation. People are savvy these days, and that will only continue. Your customers understand that there are benefits to providing data to your company. They also know that it’s as valuable as the goods they purchase from you. Most people aren’t opposed to this arrangement; they just want to be in control and benefit from it.

Customers and prospects also want the user experience when interacting with your brand to just work (including consent management). Making sure that happens is your company’s responsibility.

While requirements of privacy laws vary, one thing they all have in common is that companies have to notify those from whom they collect data — website visitors, app users, ecommerce customers, and more — about what data is collected, how it’s used, who has access to it, their rights regarding the data, and other factors.

While helping to enable privacy compliance, transparency also builds trust. By providing this information clearly and prominently, like in your privacy policy, your company shows respect for privacy and the people who provide that data. This helps increase engagement over time, including making customers comfortable providing even more data, which gives you more to work with when conducting measurement.

Limitations on access to personal data that drives measurement

To measure successfully, you have to have something to measure, right? Sure, regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) can restrict how companies collect and use personal data and require user consent. This has led to a decrease in access to some kinds of data, like third-party data, which can affect tracking and measurement.

However, that’s only the first part of the story. Third-party isn’t the only type of user data available, or even the best. There are a variety of tools and strategies to update and future-proof how you approach data collection, processing, and analysis.

For example, aggregated and anonymized data enable you to be privacy-compliant and still achieve important insights. These types of data can make specific measured attribution more difficult. It’s not a stand-alone solution, but one tool among many.

Increased reliance on zero- and first-party data

These kinds of data are the new gold standard, particularly because of their accuracy. They come directly from the user. Zero-party data is data that customers and others provide directly to your company, via account settings, surveys, feedback forms, and other voluntary measures.

This kind of data enables companies to demonstrate that customers are in control. They can specify what types of communications they want, at what frequency, via what channels. So you will know, for example, that this person prefers SMS notifications about sales and new products, no more than once a week, and you can combine that with other data gleaned from their activities on your website and other channels. Customer engagement is higher, and you remove the risk of annoying customers by deluging them with information they don’t want.

In some ways consent may be implied with zero-party data, as the customer wouldn’t voluntarily give it to you if they didn’t want you to have it, but check relevant laws and with a data privacy expert, as you may need explicit consent for how you use that data once you have it.

First-party data also comes directly from customers, but is based on actions, like purchase history, browsing the website, app usage, and other activities. It’s also quite accurate because it shows you what people are actually doing and showing an interest in. Access to this kind of data and analysis performed on it does require advance consent under many privacy regulations.

Changes to important marketing technologies

Not only are people more and more online, they’re using more platforms, which are ever-evolving. In addition to potential loss of access to data, fragmentation of data is a real risk. Web browsers today typically have features that enable cookie blocking, or that let users set privacy preferences once, which then get communicated to all websites they visit, though not all privacy laws require jurisdictions to honor them. How do marketers maintain a holistic view of customers, their activities and preferences, and campaign performance?

It’s important to work with your customers and the technologies they use to ensure seamless user experience. Like when they provide consent preferences, communicating that across devices so banners don’t have to keep popping up.

This way, once consent is obtained, tracking can be done more smoothly and unobtrusively. However, when third-party cookies are phased out or consent isn’t obtained, it can create challenges in cross-platform tracking and retargeting, which can affect measurement of campaign effectiveness.

Also, how do we ensure marketing compliance with increasing automation? Companies have a marketing stack with multiple integrations and interconnected systems. They need to ensure that not only valuable data flows through it, but also obtain consent to use that data and collect more of it.

As marketing operations and analysis evolve, you may well need to obtain new consent for those purposes. Tools that employ AI, and the effects of its analysis, may also affect data accuracy and measurement results. A number of data privacy laws also explicitly enable individuals to opt out of “automated decision-making”. So while customers may provide consent for a number of uses, they could opt out of use of those tools and their results specifically.

The future of digital measurement in marketing

We know that change has come, and that marketing activities and how we measure them have to continue to evolve. Let’s look more closely at best practices for how to achieve measurement goals in a way that also respects data privacy and keeps customers happy.

Measured attribution vs incrementality

Accurate attribution is a common concern among marketers with changes in what data can be accessed and how it can be used. Attribution refers to determining which marketing channels and user touchpoints deliver conversions and other desired outcomes from campaigns.

Marketers need to know which activities via which channels bring results so they can best allocate resources and budget. But it can be more challenging to do accurately when tracking is limited due to regulatory constraints and consent requirements.

Measured attribution has tended to rely on cookies and tracking pixels to collect user data on interactions across different channels and platforms. Of course, even before modern privacy laws came into effect, there were always challenges in accurately tracking the full user journey, and marketers have always had to adjust their tools and strategies to get the best data and insights.

Incrementality, or incremental attribution, helps to measure the true effects and impact of campaigns. How many leads can be attributed to a campaign, and how many came from other sources or originated more organically? What’s the performance lift of this campaign or that one in the overall strategy?

Testing is also important, like using A/B testing or statistical modeling to determine which of several options makes the most impact or delivers the best results. Data is also critical “food” for these initiatives.

Deprecation of tracking methods

Changes to how users can be tracked online have been ongoing for some time. Apple’s launch of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) started to deprecate user tracking identifiers in 2020 on the iOS mobile platform. Apps privacy has only become more complicated and garnered more scrutiny since then.

Google Chrome has announced plans (and delays) to fully deprecate third-party cookies in the Chrome browser for several years and started to roll it out in early 2024 before changing course and canceling those plans, instead saying third-party cookie use in Chrome will be optional. Plans to deprecate the Google Advertising Identifier (GAID) on the Android mobile platform are also in the works.

These changes and others are fundamentally shifting how users can be tracked across digital channels as individual identifiers are obscured from tracking tools.

New methods for digital measurement

These big tech companies know that new options for measurement are needed. However, at the same time, these same companies have additional requirements for data privacy compliance due to laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and their designation as gatekeepers. Their decisions and innovations affect millions of companies that are their customers.

Google Consent Mode

The most recent version of Google Consent Mode, v2, has evolved into a signaling tool of considerable value to marketers. It’s integrated with a Google-certified CMP, which displays a consent banner to website visitors and collects and stores users’ consent preferences regarding use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Consent Mode then signals those preferences to Google tags, controlling their collection and use of personal data based on consent. Consent Mode has two tag settings for managing cookie and tracker behavior based on consent:

• “analytics_storage”: determines how analytics services behave (e.g. Google Analytics)
• “ad_storage”: determines how ad services behave (e.g. Google Ads)

With consent, measurement solutions are deployed for specific purposes. If a user does not consent, then only anonymized data that is not personally identifiable data is collected and used for measurement.

Consent Mode with a CMP enables marketers to obtain and activate visitors’ consent choices. This supports data privacy management and compliance, demonstrates respect for data privacy, helps with systems integration, and enables options for measurement and ongoing access to key platforms. Consent Mode currently supports Google Analytics 4, Google Ads (Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Remarketing), Floodlight, and Conversion Linker.

Conversion Modeling

Insights into user behavior are among the most important to marketers to build out and adapt strategies. Conversion modeling uses machine learning to assign links between ad interactions and conversions. This helps to account for instances where identifiers, cookies, and other trackers aren’t available, like when consent is declined.

Conversion modeling helps marketers better understand conversion paths across devices and channels through ad interactions, as well as pinpointing roadblocks. It also helps determine the incremental impact of each user’s visit on overall visitor behavior data, when a final conversion can’t be directly observed. Marketers still get data to develop campaign optimization insights to help drive desired outcomes, like sales, signups, etc.

Currently, the most popular tools for conversion modeling are Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Ads (and Consent Mode enables it). These tools enable predictive analysis.

Conversion modeling supplements existing conversion tags, and sends hashed first-party conversion data securely from your website to Google using a one-way hashing algorithm. That data is then used to match customers who were signed in when they interacted with an ad, with their Google accounts, enabling richer data profiles for more accurate analysis of the customer journey.

A focus on personalization

Personalization is a term marketers are hearing more and more regarding how to design effective strategies for desired results in the Privacy-Led Marketing era. It’s a little different from how everyone was invited to “join the conversation” back in the early 2000s, fortunately.

Better data for improved insights

When marketing efforts are more targeted, so is the resulting data. This ties in to leveraging zero- and first-party data. Tailored messaging and offers enable tracking of very specific interactions, resulting in more detailed and relevant insights.

A strong focus on customer segmentation enables more targeted campaigns, and, as a result, better insights into demographics, preferences, and behaviors, for more precise measurement of effectiveness across critical variables.

More personalized campaigns are agile, enabling real-time adjustments based on metrics data. This helps to improve outcomes, enabling clearer performance measurement.

More engaged long-term customer relationships

Demonstrating respect for privacy and customers’ data is the first big step in building trust and increasing engagement. Over time this leads customers to consent to providing more data, and improved conversion rates. These factors make measurement easier and result in stronger insights, while respecting legal requirements.

Personalized marketing based on consent enables more targeted campaigns that are relevant to customers, which also fosters stronger relationships and greater loyalty. All of this enhances customer lifetime value and enables more accurate attribution and improved performance measurement.

Evolving strategies for the future of measurement

Accurate conversion attributions by channel or campaign can be more challenging now. Marketers need to know what strategies are driving results and how to allocate budget. And even with zero- and first-party data available, marketers need to determine the best way to engage customers to get their informed consent, without affecting user experience.

Fortunately, in a lot of ways it comes down to ensuring customers know that you respect their privacy, clearly communicating what’s in it for them, and being willing to try new strategies and tools, especially innovations that use technology to fill in gaps and enable predictions based on a wide variety of data.