Future of Measurement.

In this short video, our Senior PPC Consultant, Gemma, talks about how businesses can continue to measure when Google remove cookies on 1 July 2023.

Over the coming year, we will be providing insights that will help ensure you are ready for this change, so that you can continue to measure the impact and effectiveness of your campaigns.

If you want to find out more on measurement, please do drop us a line here.

The full video transcript is available below.

I’m going to talk to you today about the future of measurement.

We’re going to talk about how businesses can continue to measure the outcomes of their digital marketing post the deprecation of third party cookies.

Whilst I appreciate that that’s quite a dry subject, it’s really, really important.

So, it was announced very recently that, on the first of July 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer collect data, which is the main source, for most businesses, of how they understand the outcomes of not just their paid campaigns, but also organic search and any other activity that they’re doing. That’s normally the single source of truth.

So how are you going to overcome that? And how are you going to look forward and measure?

There are a few different options here, one of the biggest things is called Conversion Modeling.

Now, Google Analytics has got a new generation.

So GA4, which is a bit scary and unknown to us as agencies and also probably to you as clients, but this is based on understanding and measuring the behaviour of people that do consent to be tracked and measured, but also looking at modelling the behaviour of those that don’t. So it gives you a much fuller picture. Ad platforms are also going down that route.

Stats are saying that about 50% of people opt out of cookies when they visit a website. So, you know those fun cookie banners that you have to opt in or out of every time you visit every single website these days? Well, about half of people are opting out, which is fine.

But then it’s a question of, “How do we measure that behaviour?” And understand the people that we are measuring nd then using that to then model the behaviour of those that we don’t measure. Google Ads is also going down that route as well. So there are tools that you can use to do that. But I think that that’s also the way that Meta – so Facebook – have also gone down that route as well.

Basically, I’d really suggest making sure that you’re tracking and measuring everything that you can, making sure that you’re really understanding and looking at the next generation of analytics as well. But also thinking about, on the other side of things, making sure you’re measuring all the important actions on your website – making sure that you’ve got a really, really robust CRM. So basically a place where you’ve got all of your customer data. And, effectively, you can plug that information into your ad platforms as well.

So again, it’s basically a case of filling as many gaps as you can and having a really, really good agency that understands all of that, and understands your business, and can bring all of that together – it can be really, really valuable.

It sounds really technical but I guess if you think about it, it’s just like a really basic gap analysis. Just think about what you need to measure what you’re not measuring and how you can fill in the gaps.

I think that’s usually the best and simplest way and to just remember that everybody’s learning and everybody’s going through the same journey.

There are actually other alternatives that are being tested and tried at this stage by various other people. Like Meta, that they’re thinking about doing this in a slightly different way. But for now, you know, conversion modelling is the route that a lot of people are going down and it should give us at least more of a picture of what’s going on and how what the future looks like.