First there was GDPR, then there was CCPA, and now there's Consent Mode V2. No doubt spurred by massive EU anti-trust and privacy lawsuits and fines, Google has been inspired to roll out far more detailed consent management options than ever before. In short, website visitors will have more control over your ability as a merchant to gather details about them via third party data harvesting. We see this leading to the rise of consent management platforms (CMPs) as essential tooling for e-commerce sites in the near future.
Learn more about Consent Mode V2 here.
You may start seeing popup notifications in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) that announce that non-Google Ads conversions are now called "Key Events." That's right, Google now only considers Google conversions as conversions and everything else will be relegated to a mere "event." There is truly no other reason to do this that we can fathom, other than Google making Google look a little better and give special status to its own product more prominently.
Finally, Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) has decided to follow closely in the footsteps of Google, and announce their own version of Performance Max campaigns called... Performance Max. So yes, you can now run PMax ads on either platform, though despite its investment in OpenAI, Bing remains a substantially lower-volume platform for search.
Analytics + AdTech Changes
