When you open your Google tag manager account, you might have noticed a small banner at the bottom of the screen. It is the upcoming Safari update. The new Safari update will see the introduction of the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).
This move is a great start to improve people’s privacy. With the help of machine learning tools, the domains are determined which helps to track people across multiple websites. By only letting cookies which are acting in a third party context, it helps to limit the tracking of the ‘allowed’ Domains. The below points will help you to quickly understand the impact of the new Conversion Linker and why you need to implement it.
Understand the functioning of cookies
A cookie contains many bits of information along with the domain name. The other bits of information may include name, content and the expiration date. One important thing to remember is that the cookie can only talk to the domain it has been specifically written for.
For example when you visit a website for Astra fashions, then the cookie written for www.astrafashions.com will be deemed as a first party cookie. If the website has a cookie which sends the data to another website, then it would be considered as a third party cookie. It is essential to understand that cookies are not naturally listed as a first or third party, it is determined at runtime by the browser.
What’s the relation with AdWords?
First, it is to be understood that, as AdWords cookies send all the data to www.googleadservices.com, they are considered to be third-party cookies. More and more browsers are attempting to block third-party cookies to protect their consumers’ privacy. Leading browser companies like Safari and Firefox are taking the lead in its implementation. This means more and more people are not tracked through the regular Adwords conversion tag. With the ITP update on Safari on the horizon, it’s going to get a lot worse than before. It can have a cascading effect as the Adwords conversion data may get lost due to non-tracking.
Google, as we know, has a solution for every problem. In September it had released a new Adwords conversion tracking option which has replaced the old cookie with a supplementary Google analytics cookie. Due to this the cookies will now be considered as the first party, and thereby the above limitation can be bypassed easily. The updated Google Tag Manager Conversion Linker helps to set a cookie in your own browser and therefore even in third-party browsers it can be tracked appropriately. This way you can track all the users of browsers who have third-party cookie blocking by default and also those who have purposely chosen to block the third party cookies.
It is very easy to setup your GTM Conversion Linker Tag:
Step 1: Firstly click on add a new tag and thereafter click on conversion linker.
Step 2: Set the appropriate default trigger for all pages, and it’s all done.
With these steps, conversion can be tracked conveniently even for browsers that have blocked third-party cookies.
