Enable the advertiser/merchant to choose not to send attribution reports to click sources

[johnwilander]

I received feedback directly from an advertiser who does not want to share their attribution data with click sources. We should enable them to make that choice after or when we resolve issue 53: Send report to both click source and destination.

[pbannist]

As a publisher ("click source"), if an advertiser ("click destination") is able to know that someone (aggregated group of someones) clicked on something from my site, why shouldn't I also be able to get the information that it drove the desired action? Since the click destination typically is compensating the click source, this just seems that it would allow the advertiser to hide information from the publisher in order not to fully compensate the publisher for what actions they drove, etc.

Today, much attribution data is hidden from the publisher and that has created a bad environment where publishers have less information and gives advertisers unfair advantages.

[johnwilander]

The argument here is that the advertiser has already paid to place its ad on the click source and doesn’t want to share/leak sales numbers to external parties. The click source and the destination may not be in a relationship where they want to share such data with each other.

[johnwilander]

Example: NewEmail wants to advertise on PopularSearch and uses PCM to measure campaign performance. PopularSearch also happens to run PopularEmail and now gets to see its competitor NewEmail’s sales numbers.

[pbannist]

It's a great point and certainly what advertisers will say. Your example also is good because much of the problem here will continue to drive centralization of power and "walled gardens". Even in the NewEmail/PopularSearch example, PopularSearch has so much market power that it can just refuse to accept ads from NewEmail unless PCM attribution reporting is enabled for PopularSearch.

NewEmail is caught between a rock and a hard place at this point as if they don't advertise with PopularSearch they won't be able to grow their business, so they will accept the risk of PopularSearch getting their sales data.

On the flip side NewEmail will use the fact that they are "paying the bills" as leverage against RegularWebPublisher to not reveal attribution data to that company, resulting in PopularSearch having far more data to optimize their campaigns, driving better performance for NewEmail, and NewEmail will cut their spending with RegularWebPublisher to reallocate even more money to PopularSearch.

[dmarti]

NewEmail has a choice of whether to advertise on legit productivity sites, or on sketchy sites that scrape content, run ad arbitrage, and worse.

If they can hide their click data from the site where the ad runs, there's no downside to running on the scraper sites (even if they turn out to be run by a direct competitor). Sending click data to both the advertiser and the publisher would encourage NewEmail to limit their ad campaign to legit sites only.