For ad networks: the solve seems to be more disclosure from advertisers of customer PII[1]. All of the recent tracking prevention and cookie restriction measures are disruptive to last-mile analytics, but are far less disruptive to the overall strengths of device and identity graphs. Offline/out-of-band data feeds for click-through tracking don't require passing any identity data, since the click id acts as a key to connect the result to the associated click action. You don't have that for view-through, so instead you pass identity data and that's used to associate the result with the network's device/identity graph and attribute it to any relevant view through action that occurred. But because the advertiser is blind to which conversions/results may be relevant, they have to disclose all results and associated identity data in the process.
Caveat emptor: The above is based on my observations working in digital analytics in general, but my primary focus is in a different area. So there may be nuances or aspects that I'm not cognizant of.
For advertisers: The three main options tend to be either blissfully ignoring (or consciously accepting) the visibility gap, move towards the greater data disclosure of the above solution if you (and your lawyer) are comfortable doing so (which maintains the status quo for visibility while disclosing significantly more data to ad networks), or invest internally in the tech and resources to perform the tracking themselves (which gives the advertiser visibility, but keeps the ad network blind). For option three, you can self-host something like Snowplow[2] and abuse it as a poor-man's ad server for tracking purposes. The Cloudfront implementation model gives you the throughput and latency to allow you to use it as a view-through pixel, and you can then put it on any placements/networks that allow you to use an advertiser-provided tracking pixel.
[1] In hashed form, for what it's worth. The liability of disclosing raw PII is too black and white for comfort, but the security theater of obfuscated PII via hashing hasn't been tested in court well enough to put a dent in that practice.
I was actually curious about all of them as I've been both buy and sell side. But I'd like to dig further on the buy side.
I've seen what happens with the consciously accepting route--not pretty. Furthers distrust of a channel many already have inherent concerns and varying degrees of understanding, which is a dangerous combo.
Giving the data is what I suspect many will do unless they have sufficient resources for said legal team and technology, or care a great deal about leaking data.
The last option is interesting. So I've used Snowplow (was actually an early user that sponsored them adding UTM remapping). I'm curious how you approached using it as a poor-man's ad server with Cloudfront which I'm less familiar with. Are there any technical write-ups you could point me to?
This was a big part of the reason we built our repo https://github.com/posthog/posthog to enable first party analytics. It'll grab UTM tags all the way through to individual user behavior in your app and then provides an analytics UX on top. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.
For ad networks: the solve seems to be more disclosure from advertisers of customer PII[1]. All of the recent tracking prevention and cookie restriction measures are disruptive to last-mile analytics, but are far less disruptive to the overall strengths of device and identity graphs. Offline/out-of-band data feeds for click-through tracking don't require passing any identity data, since the click id acts as a key to connect the result to the associated click action. You don't have that for view-through, so instead you pass identity data and that's used to associate the result with the network's device/identity graph and attribute it to any relevant view through action that occurred. But because the advertiser is blind to which conversions/results may be relevant, they have to disclose all results and associated identity data in the process.
Caveat emptor: The above is based on my observations working in digital analytics in general, but my primary focus is in a different area. So there may be nuances or aspects that I'm not cognizant of.
For advertisers: The three main options tend to be either blissfully ignoring (or consciously accepting) the visibility gap, move towards the greater data disclosure of the above solution if you (and your lawyer) are comfortable doing so (which maintains the status quo for visibility while disclosing significantly more data to ad networks), or invest internally in the tech and resources to perform the tracking themselves (which gives the advertiser visibility, but keeps the ad network blind). For option three, you can self-host something like Snowplow[2] and abuse it as a poor-man's ad server for tracking purposes. The Cloudfront implementation model gives you the throughput and latency to allow you to use it as a view-through pixel, and you can then put it on any placements/networks that allow you to use an advertiser-provided tracking pixel.
[1] In hashed form, for what it's worth. The liability of disclosing raw PII is too black and white for comfort, but the security theater of obfuscated PII via hashing hasn't been tested in court well enough to put a dent in that practice.
[2] https://snowplowanalytics.com/