What the changes to Google consent means for marketers

As Google begins its third-party cookie deprecation, Google Chrome will join other major browser vendors with its own cross-site tracking limitations in a feature called ‘Tracking Prevention’.

Ultimately, this will mean that non-compliant websites - those without Consent Mode implemented - won’t be able to fully leverage Google advertising features after the 6th of March 2024.

This comes after the European Commission designated six ‘gatekeeper’ organisations that must comply with the Digital Markets Act or be handed severe fines.

Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft must now all ensure that they are only handling consented data that is compliant with the Transparency Consent Framework 2.0 (TFC) standard.

The gatekeepers themselves are unable to process this data legally, therefore they are pushing the requirement to advertisers and the users of their softwares themselves to ensure all data is compliant, thus the importance and requirement for businesses to act.

Here, Aaron Dicks, Technology Director at Impression details how this will impact digital marketers:

“Being the primary browser of choice for both the UK and US, just ahead of Safari, this change deals yet another blow to marketers through the further loss of fidelity in their marketing analytics data.

“Although Google is making this move now, it's actually the last browser to do so, and as such we're already at a place where digital attribution data doesn’t give 100% accuracy already.

“The Digital Markets Act has caught up with consumer privacy preferences and consequently those platform users who send unconsented data to gatekeepers may face data deletion, advertising account suspensions, platform functionality restrictions, and more.”

Therefore, this move adds more fuel to the fire on the few topics that digital marketers need to be considering.

1. Is your existing digital measurement compliant?

Investigate whether your website utilises an industry-standard cookie consent management platform and whether your marketing tags fully comply with the consents given by your visitors.

2. Are you opted into utilising modelled data in your digital measurement?

Digital measurement is inherently reliant upon third-party cookies, whose efficacy is at its lowest point ever. To achieve this, feed additional 'signals' or consented first-party data into your media buying.

3. How are you validating your investments in media?

Your media activations will likely be impacted by the reduced efficacy of cookies, therefore how will you validate your investments in media? Utilising solutions such as lift studies or similar could be of benefit, along with investigating how you can measure true incrementality in a cookie-less way, through testing and utilising synthetic controls.

4. Beyond digital attribution, have you started thinking about marketing 'contribution'?

Try exploring media mix modelling which can begin to estimate a single source of truth, of deduplicated media investment ROAS (return on ad spend) figures. Good quality models can also be used to scenario plan different budgets, pricing policies and media channel mixes.

Ultimately, this will be a changing landscape between now and March as advertisers enable new consent features, and after that too as additional gatekeepers are inevitably named, so a proactive approach to managing your tag management is always advised.

If unsure whether your website currently has Consent Mode implemented, submit your website domain to hello@impressiondigital.com and its Solutions team will be in touch to help.