Modernize your website tag management with a 1P tag manager

As the future of data collection, storage and processing has changed significantly, and definitions of first-party and third-party are constantly evolving, one thing is certain: the era for a limited cross-domain cookie is already here, very much like the end of a 3P cookie (aka cookieless).

The Death of the IDFA (and Tracking on iOS Devices)

Every Apple mobile device has a unique advertising ID called IDFA. It allows a device (and therefore its user) to be identified in order to display tailored advertising. Advertisers use it extensively to track individuals. They do this by collecting demographic and behavioral profiles for a particular IDFA and then sharing them with third parties who use the data to improve user segmentation and targeting.

This happened without users knowing or consenting, but Apple is changing that with its new AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. Starting with iOS 14.5, an app cannot track a user without first asking for consent. Apple defines tracking as “linking user or device data collected by your app with user or device data collected by other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes.” This is a broad definition. It includes everything from advertisers to analytics to marketing attribution. And for tracking to continue, a person must opt-in to be tracked. Even the most generous opt-in numbers show drastic reductions.

Apple’s intended effect is to significantly limit this activity. Essentially, however, it appears Apple is implementing GDPR with its original intent.

Advertisers and publishers who have relied too heavily on Google Tag Manager (GTM) are now struggling to keep their marketing signals, measurement, and attribution stacks intact.

• GTM is considered a tracker by all browsers outside of Chrome
• Cross-domain cookies restrict identity
• 3P cookies are the new “evil”; Cross-domain cookies are trackers
• If you enable tracking on Google before running a script, Google can see each user (for free).

And we are at the beginning of the change cycle. Analytics links to Google Analytics are already invalid in the EU (France, Austria, Ireland).

Google Tag Manager is dead! Long live GT!

I know that sounds ominous; Almost!

But it’s true if your tag management system is blocked about 25-40% of the time; It’s hard to imagine that website owners can just carry on as if nothing happened. Ad blockers block around 35-50% of Google Tag Management, resulting in data leakage for these website publishers. Don’t believe it – try it for free on truetraffic.io – True Traffic doesn’t leave cookies or IDs on your consumers, but informs you about the impact of data loss on your business.

By using tag management systems like Google Tag, businesses and agencies lose visibility every time a customer or prospect visits their website using ad blocker, iOS, Firefox, or privacy browsing (40%).

Because every business is expected to think about how they own the data, build trust (consent), and address compliance (regional and state laws), customer data needs to get into their infrastructure and control (controllers) before it is shared with parties distributed, who need to process their data (law).

By delegating the rules of the game to a third party like Google Tag Manager, you expose your customer to a third party even before asking permission. That’s a classic catch-22, especially considering Google is the #1 advertiser in the world. To mitigate this, Google introduced Google Tag Manager with GCP. However, the entire setup is cumbersome, expensive and does not allow site owners to own their data.

The first-party relationship – directly between you and your users – is privileged. There are no platform restrictions on the data you collect yourself, although privacy regulations like GDPR and CPRA still require consent for certain uses and types of data.

To do this, you must collect, manage, analyze and share customer data in your warehouse yourself. Warehouse data can collect consent across platforms and even allow advertisers to choose how they share data. More importantly, you can analyze the data you collect and only share what users are comfortable with, giving you the best of both worlds – understanding your users and engaging third parties as permitted.

So what is a 1P tag manager?

A first-party tag manager runs in your domain (and under your control) and makes decisions for you in your infrastructure (serverless edge to your website or app) to decide which coprocessor is allowed to see your customers’ data, but you ( the website or app) who are responsible for these decisions (controllers). Essentially, it acts as a rules engine and transformation engine while replicating data to partners via an ID graph.

Nowadays even the consent management systems are third party and lose customer identity every seven days. This creates gaps and personalization issues for sites that have lost track of an existing customer identity through their CMP; A 1P tag manager solves this.

A 1P tag manager:

• Retains a copy of a universal lifetime ID to associate with SaaS, consent, etc.
• Retains a copy of the consent log with the lifetime ID,
• Creates an ID for data sharing and deactivates itself per partner if necessary,
• Has the ability to transform and render harmless data,
• Has the ability to identify which region the customer belongs to, and
• Has the ability to connect a new data coprocessor by enabling consent for the same, similar to the old Google Tag Manager.

Crucially, with a serverless edge tag manager, data never leaves your “controller” infrastructure until you, the controller, decide to share it using only software tools that don’t have access to that data. However, big wins are 100% transparency over your data, 100% control over who the company shares it with, and a trusting relationship with the customer.

What are the advantages?

The biggest benefit of a 1P tag manager is a lifetime identity that only belongs to the site domain. This identity helps in cataloging any required ID mappings, data releases, opt-outs, consent protocol changes, etc. that should have been part of the tagging system.

So instead of giving your valuable customer data to others, you better handle the data yourself. To do this, you need a first-party data warehouse that manages and analyzes user and campaign data in your own infrastructure. And when designed right, you can adapt to technology and policy changes with relatively little difficulty – such as: B. Breaking the Privacy Shield in Europe.

As the future of privacy and trust evolves, building trust when doing business globally with zoning capabilities, enabling compliance, and providing accurate data analytics for the reality of your business is critical.

Mandar Shinde is the CEO of Blotout.io.