Mark your calendars: 3 data deadlines in 2024 for marketing effectiveness

Here are the key dates and actions to safeguard and enhance your marketing effectiveness this year.

March 1, 2024: Google Tag Manager consent mode compliance deadline

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to a privacy-centric digital advertising ecosystem, it’s strengthening the enforcement of the EU’s user consent policy in March. Failure to comply will result in data not being recorded in Google Ads accounts. Other features such as ad personalization and remarketing will also be disabled.

So, review your Google Tag Manager as soon as possible, ensuring you’re passing consent signals to tags that are sending data. Do this by the end of February.

The most pressing task is to check and implement the basic level of consent mode. If you already have your cookie banner set up through your consent management platform (CMP), make sure the latest consent mode version is enabled. This can be done through Google-certified CMPs. You can also use consent mode v2 if you maintain your own cookie banner. On this level, you will collect data only from users giving cookie consent.

Once consent mode is enabled, you can also go to an advanced level to fill in gaps of data loss for users rejecting cookies. This can be done by allowing Google tags to load before consent dialog appears. Then tags will send cookie-less pings when consent is denied, which will enable behavioral and conversion modeling to fill data gaps.

July 1, 2024: Safeguard historical GA3 data with a data warehousing tool by this deadline

GA3 properties stopped collecting data last year. Businesses will not be able to go into their Universal Analytics account to access historical data from July 1 2024 due to the deletion of historical GA3 data. This will greatly affect your reporting on attributions and hinder your forecasting ability for future marketing campaigns.

Make sure you have the timeline and actions outlined for archiving all GA3 data by the end of June for holistic reporting. You can export Google Analytics data – to data warehouse tools such as BigQuery. The sandbox account will be free of charge, but there are limits, so be sure to evaluate against Google’s billing details. You’ll also be able to import existing GA4 data to the tool, making it a single source of truth for historical and future data. This will allow you to seamlessly create attribution reports on products such as Looker Studio.

By October 2024: Enable AI performance reporting assistant

Imagine a virtual business analyst that can answer your marketing queries and give quick insights on daily campaigns and e-commerce performance in the form of an easy chat. By enabling Duet AI from Looker Studio Pro, the time you spend looking through graphs and tables in Google Analytics to generate insights can now be freed to adjust budgets, perform optimizations, and enhance content strategy.

Google has announced that Duet AI is on its roadmap of upcoming releases later this year. In Looker Studio Pro, you’ll be able to open a Duet AI chat box to ask questions about your data. You can also create presentations or reports as Google Slides based on a simple prompt. The tool will automatically turn insights and visualizations into presentable formats, which you can share with stakeholders for swift follow-up. This feature also allows you to add insights on specific areas that may not be covered in your regular reporting scope.

The Duet AI also works across other Google products such as Docs and Sheets to help you refine the reports you generate.

During peak seasons, you will thank yourself for the time saved generating insights from a sea of data, leaving you more time to implement impactful campaigns instead.

2024 is the year of data activation for you to enhance your marketing (and, in turn, business outcomes. You’ll need to adhere to these milestones to achieve that. On top of the dates above, there are also cookie changes which will need to be addressed – Chrome’s long-awaited cookie deprecation already started back in January, so you should already be looking at cookieless tracking solutions.