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Google Analytics found to be illegal in France, further crumbling the alternatives to cookies for marketers

By QueryClick 21 March, 2022

AI is the only way marketers can accurately measure performance and remain compliant with GDPR says QueryClick, provider of globally unique attribution tool, Corvidae.

Edinburgh & London, 21st March 2022:

Marketers looking for a viable solution to the impending removal of cookies have been dealt some significant blows recently as both IAB Europe and Google Analytics have been ruled as illegal from a GDPR perspective in Austria and now France, with much of the EU expected to follow suit.

The ruling means Alphabet’s Google Analytics product – the top provider for web analytics globally – can now no longer be seen as a risk-free option for businesses trading in EU countries.

Following France’s finding, the IAB Lab also announced it will not continue as the technical administrator for infrastructure to support their proposed third-party cookie replacements leaving a huge gap in the market for cross-site marketing measurement for marketers worldwide.

Marketers are being sold false promises by AdTech providers

A survey by QueryClick and Censuswide conducted in November found that 62% of marketers say they already have a solution in place to solve the issues brought about by the removal of cookies.

However since then Alphabet has dropped their widely criticised cookie replacement FloC due to privacy flaws.

Alphabet’s Chrome owns 60% of the browser marketplace, meaning any viable cookie replacement requires use of any solution they promote.

Unfortunately, their FloC replacement, Topics, offers only 350 unique categorisations, or topics, to choose from when targeting an ad.

The only way ad prices will go is up if the vast majority of businesses are forced to compete in 350 generalised ad auctions each time a web page is loaded in Chrome, and the only beneficiary of that increase is Alphabet.

What options do marketers really have?

If you are not able to target your ads cost effectively, the only alternative is to remove third-party targeting data completely in your marketing strategy.

To do that effectively requires accurate performance measurement, and achieving accuracy requires marketers to embrace AI.

In the course of developing their Corvidae platform over the last eight years, QueryClick’s work with its enterprise clients helped them to discover that traditional analytics platforms – such as Google Analytics – which rely on the use of a first-party cookie to join sessions together, return data that is at best only 20% of the true picture of a customer’s engagement with their marketing material and website.

AI-led approaches such as Corvidae, by comparison, offer provable accuracy of above 95%, completely transforming marketers’ ability to place ads without cannibalising existing activity, and confidently measure the incrementality of each individual campaign or ad impression.

With global patents on the technology required to deliver this step change in performance, QueryClick’s marketing attribution expertise and their attribution platform Corvidae have become the key to a fundamental rebuilding of advertising performance for the world’s largest advertisers.

Marketers are concerned, and understand that accurate measurement is the key

In the same Censuswide survey from QueryClick, 80% of respondents agreed that attribution would become a key part of their MarTech stack following the removal of third-party cookies.

So, the importance of accurate measurement for marketers is clear.

But not just any form of attribution will suffice, as QueryClick CEO, Chris Liversidge, explains:

“The recent rulings against Google Analytics further highlight the failings of AdTech providers to offer clear unified measurement of ad performance – and this is something we have been aware of for a long time.

Marketers have limited options available now for the impending removal of cookies. For us, the only true option is to invest in AI-led attribution and move away from the use of all cookies – including decades-broken 1st party cookies.

Our attribution platform, Corvidae allows marketers to go from 20% accuracy to over 95%, get rid of wasted media spend, and finally build sustainable, high performance integrated media campaigns across all aspects of marketing activity online and off.

In addition, Corvidae is a compliant, privacy-respecting solution that has recently been signed off as suitable for UK banking data compliance, demonstrating its robust security into the bargain.

For us, the benefits of AI are clear.”

Own your marketing data & simplify your tech stack.

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