New Consumer Privacy Laws
With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) being in place for some time now, we’ve seen how consumer privacy laws can affect pay-per-click advertising. Now, there are more states in the U.S. that are putting their own laws into place in the coming months. These states all have the same common themes that could impact PPC, and that is opting out of data collection, user consent, and transparency.
New State Privacy Laws
On July 1stof this year, Florida enacted the “Florida Digital Bill of Rights“ or (FDBOR). Also on July 1st, Oregon enacted their own privacy law, the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act (OCPA), along with Texas and their “Texas Data Privacy and Security Act” (TDPSA). This will be followed by Montana and its “Montana Consumer Data Privacy Act” (MCDPA), which goes into effect at the start of October. Finally, we have Iowa, whose “Iowa Consumer Data Protection Act” (ICDPA) goes into effect in January 2025.
There are a ton of stipulations and items that go into these laws that don’t pertain to PPC, so we’re going to discuss the relevant things. As stated previously, there are a few items that all five of these regulations have in common that have the potential to affect PPC.
Consents & Transparency
These are the two main recurring themes in the new laws. Organizations must be transparent about what data is being collected and must get user consent to collect data. When it comes to transparency, organizations are also required to give users the right to be able to access, restrict, and delete their collected data. All websites must be transparent and make the data consent and opt-out message clear and transparent on the website, making it easy for users to decline having their data collected.
Impact on PPC
The most significant potential impact would be the loss of conversion tracking. With users given a clear option to decline data collection, conversion tracking may not be able to attribute a sale or lead back to Google Ads as a conversion. This could lead to a drop in conversions and show the campaign performing worse than it actually is. On top of this, smart bidding strategies optimize better with the more data you feed it, so less conversion data will negatively impact that too.
The next area that will be impacted is audience targeting and remarketing campaigns, much like with the conversion tracking loss, users are not allowed to automatically be opted-in. As stated earlier, users must be given a visible data collection/cookie consent message. Declining that will also prevent them from being added to an audience or retargeting list. What will most likely happen will be audience and retargeting list sizes being reduced.
The common theme between these new state privacy laws is the requirement for user consent and transparency. For PPC, conversion tracking will be the most impacted, as you won’t be able to track conversions on users who opt-out of data collection. This will ultimately give you less visibility into the true performance of your campaigns and show smaller conversion numbers. Remarketing and audience campaigns will also have less reach, as there will likely be more users opting out of data collection and reducing the size of audience and remarketing lists. Advertisers will have to rely on other types of measurement to determine how well advertising is doing.
