More and more companies are betting on privacy.
Zoe Financial recently took the leap towards a privacy-forward marketing strategy. In partnership with Google and HubSpot, the fintech company rebuilt its marketing engine around consented first-party data — and grew its highest-value client segment to 60 percent of sales. “Our north star is the client, and clients value their privacy,” said CEO Andres Garcia-Amaya of the results.
In the race for performance, marketers find ourselves in a tough spot: We’ve never had more tools at our disposal, yet the path forward has never seemed so uncertain.
It makes sense. We’re facing a landscape of fragmented sources, shifting customer expectations, and stricter privacy rules, where more data doesn’t always mean better insights.
Maybe the question isn’t how much data we collect, but how strong it is.
That was the focus of the conversation between Mateus Dourado, a measurement and privacy lead at Google, and Jeff Sauer, founder of the marketing measurement firm MeasureU, at Usercentrics’ 2025 Privacy-Led Marketing Summit. Together, they explored how marketers can strengthen their data foundations, and why trust is now inseparable from performance.
This approach rests on first-party data — information a business collects directly from customers through its own channels. According to research by BCG, organizations with a first-party data strategy are 1.5 to 2.9 times more likely to see better performance compared to competitors.
It all begins with the quality of your inputs.
The connection between data strength and ROI
In the economy of attention and trust, strong data is like compound interest.
Consented signals add precision to marketing decisions. Campaigns become easier to measure, budgeting becomes easier to justify, and ROI is straightforward to demonstrate — not through guesswork, but through confidence.
As Sauer explains, “It’s about having control and confidence in what you’re looking at.” In a market where trust defines both user relationships and business resilience, strong and consented data become powerful tools in the marketer’s toolbox.
The way forward now depends less on how much data you collect and more on how well you can trust it. As Sauer says, “An algorithm is only as good as the data that’s fed into it.”
When marketers prioritize first-party data that is consented and accurate, the entire marketing engine runs smoother.
It also allows us to measure what matters to us. “The results are clear: the stronger your data, the more intelligent your systems, and the better your return on investment,” Dourado says.
The returns show up across the board: cleaner dashboards, higher campaign efficiency, and more confident decision-making.
It comes down to having control and confidence in what you’re looking at. Ultimately, any algorithm is only as good as the data that’s fed into it.
How to build strong data foundations
The challenge isn’t how to get back to the “kid in a candy shop” way of collecting data, but how to strengthen the pipelines that will inform our every decision.
This means moving from an overreliance on online signals alone to a unified ecosystem of data sources, from CRM and cloud instances to web, app, and physical store interactions.
It’s a shift that reflects a broader truth about performance today: The quality of your outcomes is directly determined by the integrity of your inputs.
Find out how to focus your marketing efforts, from tracking to trust.
Connect your data sources
The first step is integration. Most organizations operate with their customer information scattered across marketing, sales, product, and other silos, which weakens our ability to draw insights from the data collected.
“The goal is to simplify a traditional, fragmented landscape where data from different touchpoints exists in silos,” says Dourado. “This connection must always respect user consent.”
Consent, in this context, is a structural requirement. Tools like Google’s Data Manager (and other equivalent systems) enable marketers to unify data flows securely, ensuring that every signal flowing into their ecosystem has a clear and lawful origin.
Maximize data quality
From there, data strength depends on quality via completeness, consistency, and context — in other words, ensuring that signals are usable and accurate, not duplicate or misaligned.
Sauer shares a way to address this, called the CLEAN framework:
SUMMARY
- Collecting the right data
- Label it so it makes sense
- Expand it by combining sources
- Assemble it into dashboards
- Narrate what to do next
This is also where user consent comes back into focus. Because quality isn’t just about precision, it’s also about permission.
Although data that’s collected without explicit consent might seem rich in quantity, it’s actually poor in reliability. (That’s in addition to its privacy compliance risks.)
On the other hand, consented data is the foundation of long-term trust between brands and consumers, helping both to understand what the data is being used for and why.
Activate responsibly
“Activation is where the tangible value of your data strength is realized, transforming better information into performance improvements,” says Dourado.
It’s a good reminder: As marketers, our goal is not to send every dataset into every platform, but to deploy only what’s relevant, compliant, and value-driven.
In practice, activation should follow a simple rule: Feed systems only with data you can stand behind. Responsible activation doesn’t limit performance; it makes it measurable.
Demonstrating performance
The conversation about data strength ultimately goes back to one question.
How can marketers demonstrate what’s working?
For many teams, that answer is still clouded by unreliable attribution and fragmented reporting. Last-click models reward visibility, not value, and they leave marketers guessing which efforts actually drive growth.
Dourado proposes a different approach. “To demonstrate the gains of unlocking your first-party data, it’s necessary to take a modern approach to measurement — one where a strong data foundation is key,” he says.
That foundation changes what measurement looks like. Let’s say you want to understand the effectiveness of an ad campaign.
“Measure traditional business KPIs, such as revenue, profits, and leads, but expand the measurement toolkit to include proof of the effectiveness of the advertising itself,” Dourado recommends.
Instead of relying solely on surface metrics, strong data practices unlock a clearer way to connect the dots between point A (the ad campaign) to point B (large-scale business KPIs).
To demonstrate the gains of unlocking your first-party data, it’s necessary to take a modern approach to measurement — one where a strong data foundation is key.
The new ROI = return on integrity
Performance marketing has long measured success purely in numbers, like conversions, revenue, and reach.
But as privacy reshapes the digital economy, there’s a new currency of growth: trust.
According to Usercentrics’ 2025 State of Digital Trust report, 65 percent of consumers are happy to share their data as long as they understand how it’s used.
of consumers are happy to share their data, as long as they understand how it’s used.
When people feel in control of their information, they share more of it over time, willingly and accurately. Those consented signals become the foundation for stronger datasets, enabling marketers to personalize responsibly, optimize confidently, and measure more precisely.
Trust fuels performance. In other words: The more you earn trust, the more your data can earn for you.
Get up to speed on what consumers want from brands and how you can win over their trust.