Attribution Reporting API refers to one of Google’s Privacy Sandbox solutions, aimed at helping businesses track digital ad views and clicks, leading to conversions, without using any cross-site tracking IDs.
How the Attribution Reporting API Works
Quite predictably, the currently applied attribution measurement models rely heavily on cookies to track and report conversions. In this respect, one of the basic use cases would be binding a supposed reader of a particular news website, who saw an outstream video ad in one of the articles on this website, to the visitor of the relevant advertiser’s page adding one of their products to a basket, or even finalizing the online purchase.
Well, the introduced Google’s Attribution Reporting API is aimed at resolving the same task without the use of cross-site identifiers. In particular, the company has announced the new API supports two types of attribution measurement (click-through and view-through), which should enable tracking a consumer who saw and/or clicked on an ad, then took an action, labeled as a conversion.
More importantly, the launched API supports two separate types of reports: event-level and aggregated ones, providing advertisers with individual conversion data and the overall ad campaign performance data, accordingly.
And quite predictably, a web-browser (primarily, Google’s Chrome, of course) is to play a crucial part in how Attribution Reporting API will work.
Addressing User Privacy Concerns
Unlike the conventional cross-site tracking mechanisms, Google promises the newly-introduced Attribution Reporting API will imply the use of a very limited amount of data on the event level.
As for aggregated campaign reports, those will include a relatively broader range of data bits (e.g. information, regarding the product purchase and the purchase location), yet still more curtailed, if compared to the currently-used tracking IDs.
Perspectives of Adoption
As mentioned herein, the Attribution Reporting API solution is a part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, so its adoption by the key stakeholders on the digital ad market will depend on whether and how the entire scope of the Privacy Sandbox tech will be implemented across the industry.