The privacy of the internet and website users is important. There’s no doubt about that. At the same time, being able to see the website and marketing campaign data, which we could connect the dot back to the users has been one of the biggest benefits of doing business online. It is a benefit that none of the offline media has. It is how companies measure business performance. The data gives the customer insights. That is how we understand the customers. It enables us to improve the approaches and services to better serve customers. But, now we are losing the majority of the data related to site visitors due to the privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Why do people feel the need to protect privacy online? GDPR and CCPA don’t protect people from online scams and hackers. Do those ads keep following people from site to site scared them away? Many think that it’s too creepy. Perhaps, many businesses went too far with the audience targeting and remarketing projects. The thing is that it’s been done by offline media and businesses for a long time. They all collect their customer data. Why aren’t people concerned about their data collected offline?

Now that the businesses cannot collect the data like they used to, they need to think of other ways to understand the customer behaviors, preferences, and other information that would help improve the services and the products such as customer surveys and tests.

The online ads, including keyword search ads and display ads, are one of the easiest ways to test many items and get the results quickly at relatively low cost. You can test the messages, page layout, user experiences, images, videos, etc. Based on where you run the ads, you can target different audiences to obtain data for different generations or audience types. You can even test the audience in different countries.