The other week I was talking to a friend of mine who’s an attorney. We go a long way back, as far as basic training in the army where we spent a good few months shoulder to shoulder. He now works as a partner in a leading law firm and we have a few mutual clients.
We got talking about Google’s new Consent Mode and how clients have been dealing with implementing it. There was a huge technical gap, that even after understanding the required regulations, they weren’t able to bridge, even with cookie-cutter (pun intended) solutions such as Cookiebot.
The distinguished lawyer rolled up his sleeves and started learning Google Tag Manager, and was able to pull off some pretty decent implementations. I told him to stay in his lane, but we also got into what’s going to happen next in the advertising landscape.
Looking on what has transpired in recent years we can spot a clear trend:
As time goes by, legislators, and of course companies, produce more and more restrictive regulations on online tracking. GDPR and ePrivacy Directive (aka Cookie consents) are two of the most famous regulations, but we also have browser standards (i.e. Webkit), and ad blockers who enforce even harsher restrictions on any pixels running on a site.
As a result, ad platforms are forcing us into two directions:
- Enriching user activity with PII Data (e.g. Enhanced Conversions and Advanced Matching)
- Offline conversion reporting (e.g. Conversions API, aka CAPI)
In practice, this means that marketers need to send more sensitive user data (PII) and have the technical know-how to do this online and offline in parallel (with plenty of room for error).
Several main platforms have already shifted to this mode. Hubspot, for example, already keeps track of GCLID and FBCLID parameters, and is able to report changes in lifecycle stages as offline conversions to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Despite being a simple solution to get you off the ground fast, it comes with many limitations such as the Hubspot pixel being slow to load (misses attribution data) or susceptible to being blocked by ad blockers. It will also not fire if a user hasn’t consented to tracking, leaving marketers in the dark.
A better alternative is to build a fully owned 1st party pixel, practically a CDP, that will hold this data and report back to the ad platforms. However, this is beyond the technical capabilities of most companies and too expensive to maintain. There are off the shelf solutions, such as Able CDP exist, but they aren’t widely adopted yet, either because of their cost or lack of awareness.
There is, however, a simpler alternative and it is to utilize Google’s GTM Server built on GA4 events. These events run on the client side no matter what, even as cookie-less pings for users that haven’t consented to tracking. It’s recommended that they operate in a 1st party context too, so by definition are, most of the time, less prone to be blocked by ad blockers or browser restrictions.
You can even crank it up a notch by using a different client-side tracker such as self-hosted open source Snowplow to better circumvent browser and adblock restrictions.
Whichever route you choose, you will be paying some premium, or what I call a “Consent Tax”. As an industry that was used to having free analytics solutions, we will now pay a minimal fee of around $240 a year for a GCP instance or Stape account just for being able to receive the same data we collected a year ago. The alternative is simply missing data or “Direct” sessions that aren’t attributable in any way.
Yes, the cost of business has gone up with this new “Consent tax” and site owners now need to consider this when planning budgets.
And while MMMs and other fancy solutions might be a great pitch for some agencies, sometimes all your client wants to know is how many people completed a purchase by their traffic source, without having to jump through any hoops.
