Been too long since the last post but hopefully more to come!
Digital analytics and ad fraud expert Augustine Fou provides an overview of why and how to start upping your digital advertising. Especially handy is the approach to getting started with simple on/off tests in different markets.
Getting Started is Better than Not
Not perfect but excellent training wheels for harried digital marketers in need of a starting point for an experimental design approach.
Still reeling from regulations pushed by privacy zealots and the usual agitprop, here comes a disturbing development: a new digital advertising tax that continues the tradition of corrupt and poorly managed state governments to never be accountable nor live within their means. Here is the story from David McCabe @ The New York Times, Maryland Approves Country’s First Tax on Big Tech’s Ad Revenue.
A terrible precedent, with loads of unintended consequences it is too bad the authors could only find one tiny quote from the IAB on the considerable counter-argument to an advertising tax. Here are a few thought-starters:
More expensive ads: Regulation has a way of ensuring that the what is being regulated will be of poorer quality/worse level of service and of course cost more. Economist, Dan Mitchell nicely shows the trend. He could have added: K-12 education, drugs, banking and insurance.
More central planning, less free markets: It is interesting that digital ad revenue is being taxed in such a punitive way but that is proudly mentioned as a feature not bug, i.e. picking winners and losers. Do legacy media like broadcast, cable nets, radio, newspapers and magazines get a pass?
Collateral damage: What about the impact on the rest of the ad tech stack and media agencies that derive their revenue from a share or split of the ad revenue (as opposed to licensing fees)? More expensive advertising from advertisers will mean less advertising.
Tip of the iceberg: Looking past, Maryland: what about when the other 49 states that couldn’t balance their books before Covid that now decide to “get theirs”? Surely the Feds will want in on this.
Reverse uno card: Can’t wait for the first of rent-seekers say they want the tax…this typical counter-move is usually for brownie points while raising the costs for everybody else; that of course, stifles competition: think Amazon or unions being in favor of higher minimum wages.
Subsidies. Will “big tech media” then become too “big to fail” and require bizarre subsidies?
Hidden-costs. How will the new bureaucracy be administered? If the new department is paid for by the taxed then you can be sure there is an incentive to pack it with cake jobs filled by people looking to keep busy finding more to tax. Bottom-line: More civil servant jobs no doubt.
Anti-growth. Advertising facilitates business growth for the advertisers; that is why they do it. Unfortunately, when you tax something you get less of it that is “settled science”. That means taxing advertising will retard growth and therefore restrict job creation. That makes no sense but is sure as gravity. More from the Mises Institute’s Defending the Advertiser; file under screwing the pooch.
3rd Post in a 6-Part Series About the Behavioral Data Land Grab
Big G and many of their media minions are quick to point out that by using the new global site tag, they can then get around ITP’s 3rd party tracking limitations. The reason is that the GTM tag architecture tricks the user’s Web browser to treating it as 1st party by changing the context. The legacy DFA Floodlight tag cannot do this as it is a plain and simple 3rd party tracker in a 3rd party context. That DoubleClick impression cookie served up on ad delivery (on media publisher site) and then later checked for by the DFA Floodlight (on the advertisers site) is notorious enough at this point to be easily black-listed by blockers and anti-virus platforms.
Voted Most Likely to be Blocked, Deleted or Purged
Manufactured Crisis?
The global site tag (gtag.js) request often comes from the media agency team as a panicked rush to install the new code snippet – toute suite. The implication is that if these new global site tags are *not* used, then campaign measurement and therefore campaign performance will dramatically suffer or to become questionable. The implied benefit of the new global site tag is that at minimum, current paid search measurement accuracy will be better. What this really means is that Big G AdWords conversions (clickthough and (post-clickthrough) can be more accurately counted.
Most advertisers and their agencies will miss the nuance. They may not realize that simply showing more conversions in AdWords reports does not mean that Big G paid search actually caused more of them to happen. Questionable incrementality is a broader problem with paid search attribution and Big G’s walled garden of search performance data. That aside, showing the universe of conversions that an advertiser is already receiving more accurately only means that Big G’s AdWords reporting approaches the conversion tracking accuracy of site analytics like Adobe’s. Stated differently, Big G fixed their conversion tracking problem (caused by 3rd party blocking by ITP, plug-ins and anti-virus deleters) which before the global site tag relied on a predicted count. That is what has been reported out for years in AdWords. It is all about Big G more confidently taking greater credit for more of the conversions in their analytics system (not advertisers’).
Dropping the Ball: Who Do They Work for Anyway?
Instead of pushing back to Big G on behalf of their clients or suggesting alternative solutions, too many media agencies are not doing their diligence. They are pressuring clients to just go along with the request and merely parroting that Big G recommends this without much question. The implication is that the global site tag is needed for the media agency to measure better and there fore to do their very job. At the same time, most digital advertisers today do not want to provide their media agency with another reason for bad analytics and poor measurement. Meanwhile Apple ITP is conveniently blamed for the problem.
Judas Goat Leads the Sheep Up to Slaughter at Chicago Stockyards
Expected to be stewards of their client’s digital media business, this is an unabashed agency fail. All told, the new global tag combined with an expanded tag footprint on the Web site is a shifty way for Big G to also ingest more highly valuable behavioral data at the expense of digital advertisers. Even more unseemly is that this is a clever end-run to thwart advertisers that sought to limit Big G’s behavioral data access by not using their Analytics/Tag Manager products in the first place. Worse, the end result is dysfunction with analytics teams and hidden operational costs of a maintaining a redundant de facto tag management system.
Such conduct by those representing themselves as agents of marketers is disappointing. Unfortunately, it is consistent with the unflattering issues of undisclosed incentives and rebates from tech companies, media vendors and others that was revealed in the ANA Media Transparency Report of 2015. Digital advertiser clients themselves are not blameless: the buck needs to stop with them.
In September of 2018, Apple released Safari 12 and updated its Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 as a follow-up privacy enhancement for their customers. The newer ITP 2.0 update was even stricter than ITP 1.0 (released in September of 2017) going from expiring 3rd party tracking cookies in 24 hours to immediate expiration, i.e. effectively blocking all of them. The ad tech and ad network industry is rightfully concerned about this existential threat to their way of doing business. However, it should not have been a surprise to them.
For digital marketers and particularly advertisers, canny moves by Big G are taking advantage of the “crisis” situation. With long-time business tentacles deep and wide, the intrinsic value and security of advertisers’ campaign and Web site behavioral data should be of particular concern. Consider how data once captured can be leveraged by and between paid media business (search, display ad network), ad stack (ad server, DSP, DCO) and the site-side stack (search console, analytics, attribution, optimization and tag management).
Super Basic Overview of 3rd Party Cookie Tracking
To recap, 3rd party tracking cookies are the kind of cookies that are used by ad tech/networks all or in part for analytics and optimization. These cookies are different from the 1st party tracking cookies used by Web sites that are actually visited by users to authenticate and personalize the user experience (custom content), e.g. ecommerce sites and social networks. By contrast, 3rd party cookies are delivered to the browser by another and different Web server from the Web site domain that the user is accessing, e.g. Ford ads on the New York Times Web site. This is often called cookie “context.” Under the auspices of convenience, AdWords leverages an internal “link” to Big G analytics and the Big G ad server (DoubleClick/DART for Agencies/DFA/DCM/Big G Ads).
To put the tracking impact of ITP 2.0 on analytics and targeting in perspective, as of the time of this writing, Safari 12 (ITP 2.0) represents about 15-20% of all Web site visits for a typical brand with the prior Safari 11 (ITP 1.0) representing another 15-20%. That puts a combined total of 35-40% of Web site visits. In terms of unique visitors to a Web site, this is probably more like 15-20% that are at risk of being miscounted, misreported and therefore highly in-actionable. Maciej Zawadinski one of the founders of Piwik/Matomo, wrote an informative and objective piece on ITP and tracking.
For advertisers, it is also likely that there is a very distinct sociodemographic skew to this hard-to-reach and highly perishable user segment. The group tends to be higher education, more male and higher income. Think along the lines of an oldie but a goodie: ComScore’s Natural Born Clickers from 2007 updated in 2009.
Big G’s Timing and Blaming the Victim
Although 3rd party cookie tracking has been getting worse over the years, there has been a paucity of published research on this far-reaching problem. Despite having the biggest advertiser and publisher ad server market shares, Big G has nothing to say about how reliable their 3rd party tracking cookie really is in practice. Publishers and agencies are left to figure it out themselves though most do not have the time or resources. If the industry has such research it is sequestered at an account-level or within a QA group as it is unflattering at best and devastating at worst.
In one published study, programmatic tech company Digilant observed in 2012 that 3rd party ad cookies degraded quickly: by 43% in the first seven days and by 75% within twenty-eight days. That should not be a surprise with ad networks, ad servers, other analytics/targeting platforms’ cookies increasingly being blocked, blacklisted and actively deleted by users.
Instead, on Monday October 17, 2017 Big G proclaimed through the now retired DoubleClick brand’s blog:
Avoid any such pretense and use the naked GTM with the easy linking capability
The instructions to expand their presence and put it up on *all* pages almost seem helpful.
GTM Presents As A Helpful Measurement Solution…But Helping Whom?
The inconvenient truth for many digital advertisers, their media agencies and 3rd party cookie-reliant ad servers/analytics as a result of the miscounting is that important digital metrics are severely compromised. Ad tech company Flashtalking regularly quantifies and publishes research on the inaccuracy of ad metrics can be that depend on 3rd party tracking cookies. Most recently, they bravely put user cookie rejection rate at 47%! For individual users they estimate 25% are rejecters. That means that when it comes to analytics and optimization, reach and viewthrough conversions are effectively overstated while frequency is understated. For more information, see Viewthrough.org’s recent post, 3rd Party Tracking Weakening, Viewthough Impacted.
What to Do About It?
Digital marketers do have options to improve both targeting and analytics without risking more Web site behavioral data leakage to hidden players in the ad tech stack. Fortunately for advertisers these days there is a new breed of ad server that is more transparent and uses more reliable tracking methods: Flashtalking, TrueEffect and possibly Sizmek. Are there others out there? Let TOTSB know!
