Measurement in a Changing Ecosystem | Google Ads

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi everyone thank you for joining i'm karen stocks managing director of measurement solutions at google in my day-to-day job i had a lot of concerns about measurement in today's privacy environment and i spent a lot of time ensuring google solutions can help the main question i'm hearing from advertisers and agencies are how do i preserve measurement with our tagging and consent products how do i fill gaps and generate more granular insights with techniques like modeling and how are you communicating the developments that are happening in the privacy sandbox to deliver measurement without tracking individuals across the web today i'm delighted to be joined by sarah sharma our senior director of product management at google welcome syrup hey karen glad to be here so before we get started i'd actually love to ask you a question first off what are you hearing from customers and from the industry about measurement there's a lot impacting marketers today so from regulation and technology changes to evolving customers expectations and behaviors many marketers are feeling that there's no clear answer on what to do in my conversation with them several themes keep coming up firstly how am i balancing privacy while maintaining a complete picture of performance secondly how to be transparent around customer data usage ensuring that the data i do use is consented and thirdly how do you use first party data and bring it together with cross-platform tools so tell me sir how are you thinking about this from a product management perspective the most important thing that i want to highlight is that at google upholding consumer privacy while preserving measurability remains our true north that said at google we realized that there is no one-size-fits-all solution and we are invested in multiple different solutions for marketers to continue to measure over time we also recognize there's lots of unknowns in the industry and there's a lot of changes that are happening very rapidly and that can be frustrating and challenging but we are committed to helping marketers navigate through these challenges so you've touched on our vision for the future of measurement being privacy first we think about this the line to a few key pillars preserving conversion measurement without tracking individuals across the web informing and augmenting gaps in data that arise due to some of the industry changes that we've spoken about and then securing data through additional controls so tell me how do these principles come to life for marketers yeah great question so ultimately we believe the future is all about consented and modeled when cookies and other identifiers are not available and to talk about the three pillars from a product perspective we also think about the same ones around preserving informing and securing so preserving is really about maintaining existing data and so for example using things like site tagging first party data and collecting user consent that marketers can do today informing is really about supplementing gaps in data and primarily we're doing this through machine learning techniques such as conversion modeling in a privacy safe way and finally securing this is really about future proofing your data and using new privacy preserving technology like the privacy sandbox the important thing to remember here is these three pillars address both measurement and optimization of your media campaigns and they're durable over the long run so in addition to the privacy sandboxing third-party cookies and the use of other identifiers are evolving there's an increased focus on first party data whether it's from tagging or customers own business data like crms so which tools can marketers use today for tagging and conversion measurement yeah today marketers can use google tag manager or global site tag as a key foundational step in addition we're bringing you the ability to measure conversions more accurately even when cookies aren't available but through a product known as enhanced conversions and so enhanced conversions work by allowing your conversion tags including google analytics to use consented hashed first party data from your conversion page for measurement in a privacy safe way enhanced conversions also work across devices for a better representation of total user behavior i'll give you a quick example so british online fashion and cosmetic retailer asos tested using enhanced conversions to help fill in gaps in conversion measurement and what they saw was conversion rates on search increased by 8.6 percent and youtube conversion increased by 31 wow they're great results so having a more complete view of user behavior is critical and can help you make insights driven business decisions and if you explain exactly what data is being collected and how it will be used customers can make informed decisions in the type of experiences they can have with your brand depending on their privacy needs so let me look at another example as the marketing landscape shifted at the height of the pandemic nissan in asia pacific developed digital experience such as virtual showrooms to help customers view cars on display from the safety of their homes so in exchange for these experiences people provided their contact information and so with this first party data nissan was able to better understand and serve their customers they achieved five times higher test drive requests by their website at a nine times lower cost really great results so with all that in mind what are we building to help marketers ensure that they're giving customers choice about how their data is collected and used customer choice and consent is building on work we're doing already last year we introduced consent mode for marketers in the european economic area and the united kingdom and this feature is really about providing new tag settings that customizes how google tags behave before and after users make consent decisions so for users that don't consent google tags will adjust automatically how they behave and not use cookies when permissions have not been granted and so these changes respect user choices about their cookies while helping advertisers more effectively measure performance in a seamless way in addition we're introducing new capabilities built directly into tag manager itself so for marketers that are using a consent management solution you can integrate directly into tag manager without having to edit any website on the other hand if you are a tag developer tag manager will allow you to integrate directly with consent mode solutions and it always show you which tags already incorporate consent and control tag behavior based on consent status without having to modify any of your setup and the best news of all is you can enable these new capabilities in tag manager today that's really great to hear so another question i'm getting asked by marketers is concern that measurement gaps are leaving blank spots in my customers journeys and this can be due to increasing industry challenges like cookie loss so how can techniques like conversion modeling help marketers unlock more accurate measurement and better performance so right now we've been talking about preserving data which is a first step and a critical foundational component of being able to measure user behavior and it's important to do these things in tandem but it's also important because it helps inform conversion modeling efforts when ad interactions and conversions can't be observed so for example you know we talked about enhanced conversions enhanced conversion solutions actually capture more conversion data and improves the overall quality of conversion modeling another example is within consent mode we're all using conversion modeling today to address gaps and observable data and what i would say is conversion modeling enables better optimizations to make your campaigns even more effective and it provides accurate performance for advertisers already integrated with reporting and optimization tools within google that's a really good point so when business experience gaps in conversion measurement conversion modelling can help them gain a more complete picture of their conversions but modeling the machine learning can help in more ways than just conversion measurement so can you share more about how you're thinking about modeling and machine learning across multiple different use cases so there's a few different examples i can point to within google analytics first off we're extending google analytics to have behavioral reports that really provide modeling capabilities that allow marketers to get a better sense of their customers secondly we're working on ways to provide user journeys across sites and apps in a privacy safe manner third we're introducing a new modular google analytics that has a advertiser experience that centralizes our most important ads related capabilities making these features easier to discover and use and in the future we plan to use modeling to be able to provide insights and recommendations to further optimize your campaigns oh that's really great to hear about where we're going with analytics but one of the other questions i always get from customers is for a better understanding of which bits of my media are working best for me where am i getting the best returns so can you tell me what's the latest in lift measurement and how are your product teams ensuring that these solutions remain durable as we're going through this changing environment yeah so this ties back to the securing long-term durability and it builds on the themes of preserving and informing so measurement products rely on durable foundation like tagging consent and enhanced conversions and then on top of that we build machine learning models to constantly update and ensure accurate and up-to-date results on user behavior in addition businesses that are equipped to run incrementality experiments can now also run brand lift search lift and conversion lift measurement on the same campaign and these are all privacy durable solutions that provide results across the entire consumer journey an example here is fiverr which is a freelance services marketplace they ran youtube ads to reach audiences and use brand lift search lift and conversion lift to measure full funnel performance and what they saw was strong lift across all three measurement pieces including a 62 lift in searches on google and youtube and a 30 lift in new users again really impressive results so looking to the future how are emerging technologies being developed in the privacy sandbox going to help in the measurement space the privacy sandbox is really designed to support key measurement use cases including click-through conversions view-through conversions and cross-device conversions while at the same time protecting people's privacy now proposals are still in development stage and it's still early days but we're working on behalf of marketers to handle a lot of that implementation complexity as browser technologies evolve and regulations grow markers have an opportunity to proactively lead and foster innovation for a more privacy forward environment and you know what there's a lot that we can do now and the time to act is now so sir do you have any final thoughts for everybody yeah i just want to say we look forward to partnering very closely with marketers as we navigate this journey together we're committed to providing you solutions to effectively measure digital campaigns while also providing a privacy safe experience for users and the key thing that i just want folks to remember is you can get started now to ensure that your business continues to grow despite all of these changes syrup thank you for the insights and inspiration and thank you everyone for joining us today you