In brief, Ads Data Hub (or shorter, ADH) refers to Google’s martech solution, aimed at providing businesses with a set of tools to measure, analyze and improve the efficiency of their online advertising activities in a privacy-safe environment.
What is Ads Data Hub?
Initially introduced back in 2017, Google’s Ads Data Hub provides a cloud environment, where marketers can combine data from their Google ad campaigns on the event level with their first-party data (e.g. from CRM, or else) to get more actionable insights on the performance of their digital ads, while respecting their customer privacy rights.
ADH Technical Specs & Privacy Protections
Using the technical capabilities of Google’s Transfer & BigQuery, Ads Data Hub basically enables linking two BigQuery projects (a Google-owned one and a company-owned one) via the Ads Data Hub API to merge businesses’ marketing data with the event-level data (i.e. raw log data), acquired from Google’s advertising platform, and get aggregated actionable insights for the more efficient ad measurement & analysis.
In this respect, the queried dataset in BigQuery is designed to include aggregated data for 50 users at minimum in each table row, with no access to user-level data, to meet the established GDPR requirements. In addition, the ADH data warehouse implies continuous privacy checks, which may result in the filtering of table rows, in case end user re-identification risks are detected.
More importantly, the core distinctive feature of Ads Data Hub lies in the insights data being only available for marketers’ access within ADH, with no exporting options implied. This is, actually, what makes the solution compliant with the global privacy laws and regulations, like GDPR.
Key Ads Data Hub Benefits
Aside from being a privacy-centric solution in its core, Ads Data Hub includes several essential benefits for marketers. Namely, one of these lies in its robust invalid traffic detection & filtering capabilities, as well as post-view conversion measurement & analytics features.
Quite predictably, in January 2021 Google already announced the receipt of MRC accreditation for its Ads Data Hub measurement solution, for the SIVT-filtered, viewable video ad impressions, as well as TrueView video ad views, generated via the ADH UI & API. Among other things, the accreditation covers YouTube video ad impressions both on desktop & mobile web, and in mobile apps.
How to Get Started with Google’s ADH
In brief, the Ads Data Hub account setup includes the following steps:
1. Setup of the ADH account structure (i.e. configuring a parent account, sub-accounts and child accounts).
2. Google Cloud project configuration (i.e. designating your admin project & enabling the ADH API on it; creating a BigQuery dataset & enabling Data Editor access permissions for your Google Cloud project to Ads Data Hub).
3. Setup of granular access permissions to account users.
4. Google Ads account data linking with Ads Data Hub.
For more information on how to onboard and use Google’s ADH, please refer to Ads Data Hub guides.
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