The problem with tracking 

2018 has been a challenging year for businesses dependent on tracking technology to evaluate and manage their digital marketing. First, there was GDPR. Shortly after, both Apple and Mozilla announced browser features that will restrict the ability to track consumers. Among other privacy-related measures, Google made parallel tracking standard for their search engine marketing (SEM), thus providing further challenges. Finally, there is the looming doom of ePrivacy, which will come into force next year or the year after. 

The overall trend is clear. Legislators want to get a tighter grip on the way the digital marketing industry handles consumer data. Consumers are increasingly hostile against tracking activities. Big players such as Google and Facebook have started to use concerns over privacy to build even higher walls around their gardens, making it very hard for smaller players to track ads with their own technology and generating data independently. All in all, the question of whether tracking has a future at all seems legitimate. 

How did we get here? 

To understand the future of tracking, we need to understand how we got here. Although it may be hard to imagine these days, there was a time when the Internet did not exist. In those days, marketing was ruled by John Wanamaker’s (1838-1922) famous dictum – half the money he spent on advertising was wasted and the trouble was he could not figure out what half. With the emergence of the Internet, however, came online advertising and online commerce, which pretty much managed to take away these issues. All of a sudden, people working in marketing could easily avoid wasting money and evaluate, optimise and target their advertising with a precision Wanamaker would have never dared to dream of. 

The possibilities turned out to be so endless that completely new industries emerged. The Internet developed into a platform on which everybody with an internet access could both consume and produce free content because the content could be monetized with advertising. But to enable all this, tracking was and still is, vital. Ad impressions, clicks and orders have to be measured; Customer journeys have to be mapped and touch points attributed. If ads are the fuel on which the Internet is running, tracking technologies provide the pipelines. 

In short, the industry should be far more conscious about the content it was able to finance. On the other hand, it also has to be ready to admit that in its eagerness to make money, it had grossly neglected privacy issues. As ads start to appear with items a consumer bought months ago – or worse – when they are impacted with pregnancy test ads before they figured out whether they were pregnant, it is understandable that consumers get distrusting or cynical about the data being collected about them. At the end of the day, advertising is about convincing consumers to purchase goods and services and you can’t convince people without any trust. 

What can we earn back the trust of consumers? 

The future of tracking, therefore, depends on how we, as an industry, can live up to this ambivalence: being confident about what we made possible while being critical at the same time. This, of course, is a huge challenge, but also a fulfilling one. Instead of asking ourselves what business models can be maintained, we should ask how we can make them sustainable and ethical. This transformation can be illuminated by a simple example.

Since GDPR came into force, most advertisers have been putting consumers into a corner, obstructing their experience entirely should they not consent to be tracked. Advertisers who want to build trust should, instead, invest in explaining the necessity of tracking and creating incentives, in order to convince consumers to agree to the practice. 

Even controversial marketing methods such as retargeting can be made sustainable. The key, in this case, is empowerment. When consumers buy particular books, it might make sense to inform them about new books by the same author, but only if they have expressed interest in being informed. Likewise, consent management should be far more about empowerment – and that is not always as difficult as it seems. From a technical point of view, investing in tracking methods that do not depend on redirecting is a good first step in making tracking more transparent and easier to integrate into consent management solutions. 

Finally, we should invest far more in creativity. Consumers are feeling overwhelmed and betrayed by the industry due to the myriad of ads thrown to their faces regardless of how they feel towards them. Producing engaging advertisements is probably the best way to show that you care for your consumers enough to provide entertainment, and to present a new way of marketing, and even tracking, that consumers actually like. 

The post What Does The Future Hold for Web-Based Tracking? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

To say the new EU legislation on privacy and data storage, better known as GDPR, has stirred up the online marketing industry would be the understatement of the year. Numerous articles have been written, legal consultants are having a field day and every morning you receive tons of emails urging you to consent to data storage by some company you can’t remember ever creating a profile for.

Behind all this, there is a fundamental uncertainty. Everybody agrees that after May 25th, things will fundamentally change. Yet just what this change will bring about exactly, is unclear. Yes, you need to ask your customers before you can save and use their email address. Yes, the happy days of pre-ticked boxes are over. And yes, you have to be transparent on any personal data you store.

But how are you going to decide what data is personal and what isn’t? Just how granular does consent have to be? Can you continue profiling potential customers? Companies are insecure about how consumers are going to respond to GDPR and how the authorities are going to interpret and administer the new legislation. And there is the question of what changes in jurisdiction GDPR-related court cases will bring about.

One of the topics which raises the biggest uncertainties is tracking. GDPR is not a regulation aimed at the online industry, let alone the online marketing industry. It has nothing to say about tracking specifically. However, that does not mean business as usual for tracking. Particularly the prohibition of storing data that can identify a person indirectly will have consequences for common tracking practices. Even the ID of a simple cookie used to track an ad impression or a click on a banner might be considered data that allows indirect identification.

As pointed out by MarTech, ‘legitimate interest’ is not the get-out-of-jail-free card to get any data you need for tracking. Your legitimate business interest has to be weighed against the interest of the person involved. Which interest will be heavier will probably be defined in court, but waiting for this moment is not something most online marketing companies will see as a fruitful strategy.

The good news is that there actually are things you can do. Publishers and advertisers can start to ask users to consent to tracking proactively, and companies providing tracking technology can implement solutions which support them in doing so. But there is an even simpler solution to avoid data privacy issues: start respecting the do-not-track header in the browser settings of consumers.

The do-not-track option was introduced by Microsoft for Internet Explorer in 2010 and was soon adopted by other browser services, including mobile ones. The idea behind the header is simple: it informs any website that the user of the browser does not want to be tracked, i.e. data on her or his behaviour should not be stored. Any tracking technology on the website could use this information to disable itself – could because very few tracking technology providers actually honour this.

Nevertheless, the do-not-track header is a very straightforward statement from the side of the consumer. GDPR may not mention it, but being all about consent, it goes against the grain of the regulation to ignore it. Naturally, respecting the do-not-track header will have an impact on business. Usage varies from browser to browser, but according to online privacy organisation Baycloud Systems, 10.5% of all browser users have activated the do-not-track header by default. Especially advertising companies with performance-based business models will suffer from this.

However, business models can be adjusted, while GDPR cannot. The online marketing industry has a clear choice to make. Either it tries to maintain its current practice and risk facing a lot of legal repercussions and controversies, or it takes GDPR as an opportunity to take people’s concern about data privacy seriously and adjust practices accordingly. The main job for technology companies is to enable these practices and develop tracking solutions that are consent-based. Respecting do-not-track headers is not the magic key, but it is a damn good start.

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