Analytics in a Privacy-first Environment
Hey there and welcome to the forth edition of Digitl News on LinkedIn!
In this edition we are excited to share a new customer success story featuring Berge & Meer, a leading German travel agency, that recently improved measurement and attribution securely with server-side tagging. With the evolving privacy regulations and the scarcity of third-party cookies, Berge & Meer focused on first-party data and set up server-side tagging via Google Tag Manager.
The results were impressive, with complete control over their data and an 11% improvement in measuring conversions, along with a 15% increase in attributing users to paid search traffic. Find the case study down below.
In this context, we will discuss in our 'just briefly' section the data privacy benefits of Google Analytics 4, server-side tagging, compliance dashboards, DataPlex and Cloud Identity.
Customer Success Story
Berge & Meer improves measurement and attribution securely with Server-Side Tagging
„Digitl has helped us establish state-of-the-art user tracking by enabling server-side tagging. It is possible to track and attribute the performance of a greater number of users when first-party cookies are used.”
Johannes Grandmontagne | Head of Online Marketing
Goals
Approach
Results
For the full case study, click here.
Just briefly
Google Analytics - Privacy Measures
Google Analytics 4 is a state-of-the-art data analysis tool and offers numerous data privacy features out-of-the-box in order to customize the sharing of information to one's preferences. For example, permissions can be assigned at the account level in order to deny access to Google's technical support. In addition, the anonymous use of data for benchmarking purposes can be refused.
On the property level itself, there are further options that contribute to data security. For example, the Google Signals feature can be found under the Property Settings. Google Signals links information about visitors with information from their Google accounts in order to display demographic data, interests, etc. anonymously and aggregated in the interface and to use this data for remarketing. If you do not want this, you should make sure that Google Signals is disabled. Other property settings include the data retention period and limiting the collection of granular location data at the country level. Overall, it is definitely worth checking out GA4s privacy principles to ensure a GDPR-reliable tracking. In addition to the above, server-side tagging should be on everyone's agenda.
Server-side Tagging
GA4 anonymizes the IP address on European servers. If that's not enough, you should take a closer look at server-side tracking. This literally puts a middleware or proxy between the website users and the analytics server. This allows all traffic to be cleaned up and there is never a direct connection between the website users and Google Analytics.
This results in many other advantages. Not only do companies have full control over the data they share, they can increase data quality and the amount of data collected.
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But how is this possible? Apple's Intelligence Tracking Prevention or Firefox Enhanced Tracking Prevention delete Javascript generated cookies from detected analytics tools within 7 days. Here, the server-side GTM sets http cookies that do not fall into this category. This has a significant impact on the quality of attribution and the measurement of a consistent customer journey. In addition, tracking libraries can be hosted in the sGTM. This allows most tracking blockers to be bypassed. Recent tests have shown that we can collect 30% more data on average.
In addition, you can hide the IP address or share only the part that is required for GEO localization. You have the option to pseudonymised the user ID and remove other data like the user agent or even campaign information from the payload. How far you go is up to you.
In sum to have full control over all your web analytic data, GA4 and server-side GTM are an unbeatable duo. But how to keep track of all settings across multiple Google Analytics accounts?
Compliance Dashboard
Imagine you have to manage a large number of Google Analytics accounts and their users. This includes employees from different departments or even countries, agencies and other stakeholders who need to work with the data. In this case, how do you keep the settings you make in the interface compliant with company policies and the data privacy regulations? This is where the numerous APIs of the Google Marketing Platform come into play. These not only allow you to create reports outside of the interface, but also to retrieve and update settings. In this way, the actual status can be compared with the specifications manually or, depending on the expansion stage, also automatically. This can be clearly displayed in a dashboard or, thanks to automation, you can simply be informed by email.
Cloud Identity
Ensuring Security in Google Cloud starts with securing the accounts used by employees for day-to-day tasks in Google Cloud. Often employees create their own Google account with their corporate email address. This account type is completely unmanaged, undocumented and inaccessible for the IT department. Not the best approach to ensure IT governance and security. Furthermore users might keep access to their account after leaving the company since there is no automatic account suspension.
To mitigate these risks, we recommend implementing Cloud Identity. Cloud Identity is an identity and endpoint management platform allowing IT departments to integrate Google account management into their existing account management infrastructure e.g. within Azure Active Directory. It is installed as a plugin into the existing LDAP environment and syncs user accounts and, optionally, groups one-way into Google Cloud. IT administrators are free to sync only a subset of their users, edit mapping settings and domain settings. Within Google Cloud admins can use a single admin console to manage user, access and app policies, monitor security and compliance posture within Google Cloud, create custom reportings and use auditing capabilities.
Cloud Identity yields advantages also for users. It gives users easy access to apps with single sign-on with their existing corporate account login. Also users do not have to create a new account once they start using Google Cloud since accounts are provisioned automatically by the IT department. Once a user leaves the company, they do not have to take care of shutting down their Google account manually since Google accounts are suspended automatically as soon as their main corporate account is suspended.
DataPlex
Organizations store data often in different locations. And even if there is a central storage location, data ownership and knowledge about the dataset stored is decentralized across different teams. DataPlex is a tool in Google Cloud aiming to better manage data at large scale across teams. It allows the setup of a custom Data Catalog with advanced metadata management, to assign business ownership to data sets and advanced access management across the organization.
One of the core concepts making DataPlex powerful is the idea of data fabric. Users are splitted into data providers (teams providing data such as human resources, website, marketing) and data users (advertising team, data analysts, data science). Data providers are responsible to ensure validity and availability of the data they provide as part of a data contract with data users. Data owners are allowed to search for help e.g. from the IT department to set up data pipelines, but from the business perspective they are responsible for the data they provide. Data users can search on an internal company-wide data marketplace for data sources they need.
After setting up DataPlex companies benefit often without much additional effort from an increase in user privacy. Auditors are able to identify data sets with personal identifiable information (PII) from a single pane of glass. Marketing teams can enforce and change data retention policies from one central location for all their data. And IT administrators are able to view information about who has access to which data right within DataPlex.
DataPlex is a powerful tool to break through data silos with its data discovery, management, monitoring and governing capabilities. It is compatible with any type of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data for up to thousands of daily users managing petabytes of data stored in Google Cloud. By leveraging these features, companies often benefit automatically from better user privacy. Please feel free to contact us at Digitl Cloud for more information about DataPlex!
Join us at:
Analytics Hub Webinar
Our successful Analytics Hub webinar series continues on the last Thursday of this month (27th of April 2023).
This time George, one of our Senior Consultants, will take you through the new Enhanced Ecommerce features and give you a comprehensive overview of what's new and what you need to know when using Ecommerce reports in GA4.
And this time we're going one step further. Christian, one of our cloud developers, will be covering a very important topic on security in Google Cloud and GMP. Here you will learn everything you need to know about Google Cloud Identity. Have you ever heard of it? If not, you should join us to protect your users' Google accounts.
The event will be held in English.
When: April 27, 2023, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. CET
The link to the event will follow soon.
So stay tuned and follow us on linkedin for more Information!