The importance of site-wide tagging for accurate conversion measurement in DoubleClick Search

Measurement is foundational to digital marketing. Heading into the holidays, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your online sales, reservations and leads are measured accurately. To that end, we wanted to bring an important update to your attention: the recent introduction of Intelligent Tracking Prevention affects conversion measurement on Safari. It’s important to update your website tags as soon as possible to support measurement of conversions from Safari. This is in line with Apple's recommendations for ad attribution. Without updating your tags, it will be difficult to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Site-wide tagging preserves your visibility

There are multiple ways to measure the performance of your online advertising. The best options rely on site-wide tagging—tagging that’s applied to every page on your site. Applying the tag to every page of your site keeps your measurement updated and helps to measure conversions more accurately, including in Safari's ITP environment.

There are two options for complete measurement of conversions from Safari in DoubleClick Search:

Option 1: Install the global site tag (gtag.js) on your entire site

The global site tag (gtag.js) is a new web tagging library that works across Google's site and conversion measurement products–giving you better control while making implementation easier. The new tag will now serve as the single tag for both AdWords and Google Analytics, with support for DoubleClick Search coming mid-November. By setting it on every page of your site, and including event snippets on your active conversion pages, the global site tag will send conversion data whenever event calls are made.

Stay tuned to learn more about DoubleClick Search support for the new global site tag in November.

Option 2: Use Google Tag Manager

For customers who are already using Google Tag Manager, there's no need to make any changes to your page—simply add the Conversion Linker tag in the Tag Manager interface, and set it to fire on all pages.

If you're not using Google Tag Manager, you can get started today. Alternatively, you can start with the global site tag (option 1 above) and then easily upgrade to Tag Manager in the future.

If you’re using a non-Google tool for website measurement, check with your vendor to make sure your solution allows you to measure conversions in Safari's ITP environment.

Estimating untracked conversions in DoubleClick Search

To help you accurately measure and take action on your conversion data, DoubleClick Search uses statistical modeling. Statistical modeling gathers website conversions for traffic that can’t be measured from Safari and includes them in your DoubleClick Search reporting.

We’ll continue to use statistical modeling in Doubleclick Search where site-wide measurement isn’t applied. However, using site-wide tagging will let you better understand your marketing performance across all DoubleClick products.

Measurement in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager

The two options outlined above also provide more complete measurement of conversions in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. You can use Google Tag Manager today and the new global site tag in mid-November. Campaign Manager and Bid Manager customers using these two measurement solutions will start to see improvements in measurement coverage over the next few months.