Google et al are trying desperately to get advertisers to use Enhanced Conversions due to the deprecation of 3P cookies. Their entire business model literally depends on advertisers making this switch. Hence, I have played a small role in writing a help article on this subject – just published at Piwik Pro: How do Google’s Enhanced Conversions and Meta’s Advanced Matching impact analytics.

My personal pov is that this approach is an even bigger invasion of privacy than before – I call it “cookies on steroids“.

What’s the problem with Enhanced Conversions?

Until recently, Google’s and Facebook’s business model relied almost exclusively on 3rd-party cookies – a cookie that allows them to track where and what users are viewing across the web, so those users could be profiled and targeted for ads. Called remarketing, its the basis on their surveillance economy. The steady erosion of user trust to accept these cookies, plus strong privacy regulation, is now forcing these adtech titans to change their approach.

Enhanced Conversions and Advanced Matching are their respected answers. (Bing, LinkedIn, Tiktok and many others are doing the same).

How enhanced conversions work:

BUT

Despite the innocent sounding use of “first party data” to do this, its a myth (actually a misdirection) that Enhanced Conversions or Advanced Matching are privacy enhancing features. The approach is based on unique hashes of user’s personal data and that is pernicious for two important reasons:

1. Submit your personal details into a purchase, subscription or contact form, and the hashes generated are a unique fingerprint of you that sticks around many years, even decades. For example, how often do you change your name, email address, home address, or phone number? If you are not changing these regularly, the same hashes will match you on *any* other website that uses the same technique.
2. Unlike with cookies, the user has virtually no control over the collected hashed data. Hashes are stored by the adtech platform, not on your device. Good luck trying to get them deleted.

But I have user consent – so what’s the problem?

Yes, in theory a website that has a user’s consent to use this approach solves everything. But what really are people be consenting to? This is the point of my post – to highlight the myth/misdirection pushed by Google et al that this technique is “privacy enhancing”, or that by using only 1st party data it is not tainted by issues long discussed about 3rd party cookies.

The truth is, such Enhanced Conversions techniques are more invasive than ever before. The main loser is the website owner, but the overall degradation of user trust in businesses using such techniques, means the entire data ecosystem is being pushed close to a tipping point. And that bothers me.

Privacy is the equivalent of trust.

Trust works like love, it cannot be bought.

Trust is fragile – like an egg, once its broken it can never be the same.

What choice does an advertiser have?

A business thrives by encouraging people to fill in forms – to buy, subscribe, make contact. A big part of that process is giving people plenty of reasons to trust you as a business. A remarketing approach based on surveillance profiling, breaks user trust. Nobody likes to be profiled.

Contextual remarketing is a real alternative – it has been around for decades and works without profiling your customers. (Ironically Google was a world leader of contextual remarketing in the 2000s). If you are in business for the long term, I would posit that the gains of building long-term trust with your customers and prospects, will far outweigh the short-term benefits of remarketing by stealth.

An initial version of this post was first published on LinkedIn, Nov 2024