Summary
Challenges:
- Multiple compliance solutions were resource intensive to maintain and brought higher risk
- Multi-country and multi-regulation privacy compliance requirements
- Google’s consent signaling requirements
Goals:
- Consolidate and streamline privacy compliance operations
- Build and maintain customer trust
- Future-proof compliance operations for growth and evolution business, tech, and regulations
- Acquire full-stack data to gain better insights, including from all Google services
Results:
- Much lower resource demands for implementation and maintenance of the consent solution.
- Easier to maintain privacy compliance as business and regulatory requirements change.
- Meeting Google’s privacy requirements.
- 20 percent data quality improvement
The Company
Since 1923, Conrad Electronic has been a reliable partner when it comes to technology and electronics. Today, as a sourcing platform, the company provides all parts for successful sourcing of technical supplies. At Conrad, business customers get exactly what makes their project or business a success: a wide and deep product range, customer-centric solutions and services, and face to face expert advice.
Conrad Electronic’s ecommerce business ships to over 150 regions around the world. The company has been in business for just over a century, with 2,500 employees worldwide, and is headquartered in Hirschau, Germany. Conrad has been a Usercentrics customer since late 2021, and currently uses the consent management platform on 16 domains.
Challenges
We talked to Manuela Kick at Conrad Electronic about how the company handled privacy compliance, their consent management strategies and integrations now, and their goals with privacy-led marketing, including using Google Consent Mode (GCM).
Data privacy and protection are high priorities for Conrad for several reasons. Being based in Germany and doing business across Europe, the company has to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as legal guidelines on a country by country basis. Conrad also needs to meet Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF v2.2) requirements for their use of Google Ads.
Additionally, Kick noted that building and maintaining the trust of their customers is critical, especially as a B2B sourcing platform where their reputation and reliability are tied to that of their business clients.
Prior to becoming a Usercentrics customer, Conrad Electronic SE had multiple solutions in place, which was resource intensive to maintain, and more prone to errors. For example, as Kick notes, “Previously we had multiple solutions in place. In some countries we had a self-made cookie banner, in some countries we had Cookiebot CMP.”
Unsurprisingly, maintenance and upgrades required a significant amount of planning and work, like when they were planning to upgrade to the TCF v2.0. Their Marketing department did the due diligence that led to the company’s decision to implement Usercentrics CMP for all countries.
Goals
In addition to compliance with GDPR and other relevant regulations and guidelines, the Conrad team wanted full-stack data, including Google’s modeled data provided in the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) interface to improve their analysis and marketing campaigns.
It was also important to Conrad to meet Google’s data privacy requirements, and be able to seamlessly collect valid consent and signal those consent preferences from their users to Google services. Conrad started using Google Consent Mode v1, and now uses the Advanced Mode of Consent Mode v2.
The Conrad team makes extensive and integrated use of additional Google services, including:
- Google Tag Manager for tracking
- GA4 for tracking and analysis
- Google Ads/Ad Manager/AdSense / Ad Exchange for advertising
- Google Forms for data collection
- Google reCAPTCHA for security on forms against bot traffic
Why Conrad Electronic chose Usercentrics
The Conrad team appreciated that Usercentrics was also based in Europe and TCF-certified, with a proven track record and expertise in regulatory compliance with the GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and national laws and guidelines.
Usercentrics’ ability to enable robust and streamlined scalability for Conrad’s web properties was also an important consideration.
About working with the Usercentrics team and the resources available, Kick commented that, “Documentation is easily accessible via the web and easy to read. The GCM integration was also well described. We also received a lot of support and recommendations regarding implementing the combination of GCM and the TCF v2.2.”
Results
Conrad Electronic SE started enjoying benefits from Usercentrics CMP pretty much immediately after implementation, going online with their first country site in May 2022. CMP maintenance was much easier, as was the upgrade to TCF v2.2.
The Conrad team directly implemented Google Consent Mode into their content management system, and it works in conjunction with Google Tag Manager.
When asked about challenges with implementing Consent Mode, Kick noted that it did take some time to have the updated data reflected in their GA4 dashboards. However, she also noted that now, in their marketing dashboards, “We are able to see the modeled data and compare it to SAP data. With Google Consent Mode we are able to reduce our tracking gap with regards to transactions.”
With Consent Mode, she also noted improvements in data analysis and a data quality improvement of about 20 percent.
When we asked how Conrad’s experience with Usercentrics has been overall, Kick concluded, “The contacts at Usercentrics are always very friendly, helpful and patient. We appreciate the smoothly running service and during our collaboration. There were no outages on Usercentrics’ side — it’s a reliable partner.”
With regards to what we could do better or what the Conrad team is looking forward to, she added, “Although there were limits in regards to A/B testing and customizations in the CMP v2, we’re looking forward to CMP v3, which will offer us more freedom and possibilities in testing and personalization.”