Digital TransformationStrategy & LeadershipHow pixels and tags can help you survive the DoubleClick cookie limitations

How pixels and tags can help you survive the DoubleClick cookie limitations

Google is not allowing us to track DoubleClick IDs beyond its platform anymore. What does this change mean for a marketing strategy and what are the alternative options? How can you maintain a successful measurement of your marketing efforts?

How can you survive Google’s latest changes in DoubleClick IDs to maintain a successful measurement of your marketing efforts?

Google has announced that it will no longer provide access to DoubleClick IDs in the European Economic Area after the implementation of GDPR. This decision has shaken the marketing industry as both marketers and vendors wanted to ensure that their work won’t be affected. What does this change mean and how can pixel and tags help you survive this change?

An overview of the changes

Google has decided to stop populating data for DoubleClick Ids after the 25th of May for EU users. There will be no data transfer files in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager and also not on Youtube.

This data allowed marketers to measure their performance across all channels improving their multi-channel measurement activity. Google’s decision makes it harder for advertisers to analyze their campaigns and how the split between Google and other platforms can be compared. This change is affecting European users that started using May 25th, but it is also expected to affect more countries during the year.

It brings out a question whether it’s better to focus only on Google’s platforms to keep your data in one place or if you need to go all aboard a third-party platform. The good news for this decision is that Google has already built its own attribution platform to help you measure your activities, while it is also partnering with several advertising partners to make access to data easier across other platforms.

The concern still exists for now, on how to measure your marketing efforts from now on, especially during this period of transition.

How do the changes affect us?

Multi-channel marketing is common nowadays and this brings out the challenge of analyzing the effectiveness of each platform and how every touchpoint contributes to your overall goals.

Marketers want to see a complete picture of their work and that’s why they rely on data-driven attribution strategies to create successful campaigns. They want to analyze the performance of their strategy to discover the most successful touchpoints among all channels.

This change can make it harder for marketers to compare data across different platforms, which risks the ability to have an overview of all your marketing activities. This can lead to possibly missed touchpoints from an inability to spot all attribution levels as part of your campaign, while if you decide to use a third-party app you will need to be able to access your Google data.

The challenge is harder for independent attribution platforms as they now need to ensure that they provide the best data for their customers in a way that they’ll be tempted to leave Google’s ease of data access.

It’s positive though that Google seems eager to work with several advertising partners to facilitate this transition so this leads us to the importance of finding the right third-party app that will work along with Google.

How to move away from DoubleClick IDs

If you’re looking for an alternative to Google’s DoubleClick IDs, then pixels and site tags can help you with your attribution tactics. This way, you can still track your marketing performance even without Google’s cookies, maintaining your access to important customer data.

What’s important is that the decision to focus on pixel and site tags allows you to analyze your cross-channel performance without missing key elements of your strategy. It allows you to maintain a holistic approach to discover the most successful touch points in your campaigns.

Pixel tags, or simply pixels, are added to your site to track users’ IDs to facilitate attribution measurement. They are actual images and they are tracked from the ad servers to monitor the users’ visits.

Site tags, or simply tags, rely on Javascript codes to monitor the traffic and what counts as unique ID for each visit. Tags can help you access more accurate data to ensure that you’re not tracking sessions as unique visits, while they can also help you with the process of measuring attribution for each channel.

Both options can be very helpful to make attribution more effective and they can become even more popular with Google’s restrictions on DoubleClick IDs.

What’s next?

The next step is to decide the way you’ll measure your attribution and your marketing efforts from now on.

  • If you focus on Google’s platforms, then you need to ensure that your multi-channel strategy can still be measured by Google’s IDs to bring all the data together
  • If you decide to use a third-party app to measure your attribution and the best performing touch points, you need to ensure that the platform is partnering with Google and helping you with pixels and tags to track all visits

What you want in either case is to ensure that you’re still able to monitor attribution as efficient as possible.

Google’s recent changes should not keep you away from a complete overview of your customer data and how each channel performs. So now is the best time to research for the best measurement options.

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