Analytics

Agency-client relationships are more crucial than ever to drive privacy centric strategies.

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We are witnessing a seismic shift in the advertising landscape in response to privacy concerns and ongoing ad regulations, with even more profound changes to come. Developing privacy centric strategies while sustaining results becomes increasingly important to brands in this environment, as they turn to their service partners for support.

As the privacy issue has evolved over the past year, it has compelled many brands to reevaluate their strategies, much like the “pivot to mobile” in the last decade. Advertisers then, as they do today, recognized the magnitude of a major shift in marketing and adapted quickly. A shift in this direction has presented an opportunity for Emerge Digital to step up, utilize insights from our diverse client accounts, and provide direction to advertisers looking for guidance. For brands and agencies to avoid a desperate sprint to the finish line, they need to partner now to thoughtfully build for the future.

Emerge Digital’s journey towards privacy has been far from linear, consisting of many trials, errors and, ultimately, successes. Together with our clients, we have been able to recognise the magnitude of the shift underway and prioritize solutions that will mitigate potential future data loss or diminishing performance while respecting user rights.

Based on our own experiences, we have developed three powerful principles that can help strengthen agency-client relationships and sustain performance outcomes.

Realign your team structure

Understanding how privacy shifts will affect businesses is the biggest challenge for our clients. In some cases, we even see skepticism about the need to prioritize these shifts. Our own privacy journey revealed that a seemingly insignificant change in organizational structure had a profound effect. To make sure our clients and account teams stay up-to-date on the latest industry changes, we appointed a senior leader to oversee agency wide privacy efforts.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for these problems. Keeping pace with new developments is necessary for agencies to support their clients. Clients may feel overwhelmed by the jargon and find it difficult to pick the right solution for their needs. Using customised trainings, workshops, and guides, we help our clients stay informed on the latest industry trends and find the solutions that are suited to their needs. Additionally, we’re building trust and empowering brands to adapt their road maps effectively and develop long-term strategies that meet the current needs.

Implement early and test often to discover Hidden Performance Improvements

Educating clients has resulted in rapid adoption of privacy solutions. For instance, our client Visionary Optometrists, a direct-to-consumer vision and eye-care brand, was eager to implement privacy-safe solutions early on. Consequently, they understood that the faster they moved, the better their data and, therefore, their performance would be.

Visionary Optometrist was able to establish a robust measurement foundation because of this open-minded approach early in 2022. The brand saw a 6% uplift in e-commerce conversion rate soon after implementing Google’s enhanced conversions for web and ensuring complete tagging across all properties. Thanks to their prioritization of these privacy-safe solutions, Visionary Optometrist’s has better insight into their customers’ journeys and a single source of truth for marketing decisions.

Embrace automation

After you have built a strong tagging infrastructure and implemented privacy-safe measurement, Google’s automated solutions can kick-start your campaigns to achieve better results. By intelligently combining your first-party data with other available signals, automation helps to fill in measurement gaps when there is less user data available. Clients who have adopted Performance Max campaigns, launched this year, have seen these improvements directly.

The time has come for us to work together to strengthen our measurement, educate each other, and embrace solutions that protect our privacy.

One of these clients was Couriers By Demand Express, a national shipping and logistics company . Couriers By Demand Express partnered with Emerge Digital to lead the brand’s digital transformation after the pandemic drove increased demand for deliveries. 

By using Google’s automation tools, Couriers By Demand Express is able to drive growth for the company across all channels and stand out from the competition. It quickly became clear to the brand that the success of this push depended heavily on its measurement strategy. With offline sales signals incorporated into Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm, the team now has a complete picture of performance across channels and is investing in Performance Max. Despite third-party cookies being phased out, we are confident that clients who invest in privacy-centric measurement, like Courier By Demand Express, will continue to achieve performance goals and be well-positioned for future growth.

Agency-client relationships are crucial to navigating the changing data privacy landscape, both because privacy is not a one-size-fits-all issue and because we’re in it for the long haul.

As the proverb goes:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

It is time for agencies and clients to work together to strengthen measurement, keep learning, and adopt privacy-preserving solutions that help them succeed this holiday season.

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