Extended opt-out

Extended opt-out

As an audience measurement solution, Piano Analytics collects, processes and stores personal data, in particular through the use of tracers (cookies, mobile identifiers, etc.).

Many regulations require user consent by default for the processing and use of audience measurement data.
According to a recent study, the average consent rate on "computers" in Europe is 65%. This means that over a third of traffic is simply not measured and therefore not monetized.

"Consent-less" solutions exist to collect the missing data and enable value to be added.

On a European level, thanks to the ePrivacy Directive, Piano Analytics has been offering for several years a configuration that allows an "exemption" to the consent, using a tracker/cookie to collect "strictly necessary" data (see dedicated article).

In addition to this Exemption system, Extended Opt-Out provides a new alternative for data collection without consent, thanks to the principles of data anonymization.
Contextual audience measurement data that does not identify the visitor or even the visit can be collected without consent and is particularly valuable in terms of content performance.

The following sections explain how this Extended opt-out works and how to implement it in your Piano Analytics solution.

How it works

Extended opt-out refers to the processing of data from collection to storage.

Collection

If an Internet user does not want to opt in to audience measurement, you can trigger the Extended Opt-Out via tagging (see the "Implementation" section). A "_pprv" cookie is set to store the user's choice (this cookie takes the value "opt-out").

Events sent to Piano Analytics will now contain the following information

• idclient - "optout"
• visitor_privacy_mode - "extended-optout"
• All other properties without distinction

Processing

For each event with a visitor_privacy_mode set to "extended-optout", the processing will set up different treatments:

• Creating an Event without a Visitor ID or Visit ID
• Delete all properties associated with an enabled personal data flag
• Add an ".optout" suffix to the end of the event name

Storage

Events are stored in the all traffic table. They are not linked to other events because they do not have a match key such as "visitor_id" or "visit_id".

They have an ".optout" extension, as seen in the previous step. Extended opt-out "page.display" events are therefore named "page.display.optout".

Overview

Use of Extented opt-out events.

How to use the data

Events collected via the extended opt-out will not affect most of Piano Analytics' core metrics. You shouldn't see a significant increase in your core metrics by enabling this feature (except for the "Event" metric).

This is because our metrics are filtered by event names. Extended opt-out events have a new name (my.event.optout) and are therefore not taken into account.

Let's take the page views metric as an example. This is the sum of page.display events over a given time period. Because pages collected in extended opt-out mode are called "page.display.optout", they are not included in the "page views" metric.

The event metric does take them into account. It counts all collected events.

This means that you'll need to create your own metrics to take advantage of the data collected in the advanced opt-out. For example, a "page views including opt-out" metric that would count both consented and non-consented page views, or a "sales excluding VAT (transaction) opt-out only" metric.

Type of analysis available

Globally, all metrics based on properties that do not contain personal data and are not based on a visitor or visit ID are available via the extended opt-out.

This excludes analysis of time spent, sources and visitor retention. Anything that has persistence over time and needs to link events together.

Example of data not available:

• Time Spent
• Conversions
• Bounced visits
• Bounce Rate

This allows you to analyze data related to your text, audio, and video content. Some e-commerce analytics are also available.

Example of available data:

• Sales without VAT (Transaction)
• Impressions
• Events
• AV - play time

Implementation

Extended opt-out is enabled from the tag. This is a library configuration.

The prerequisites are:

• At least version 6.13.0 of the Piano Analytics JS library.
• Using the Consent Management module
• Use the "optout" consent mode

To enable Extended opt-out, you must enable the configuration when you initialize the library (see the developer documentation):

enableExtendedOptout

This configuration changes the historical behavior of the Piano Analytics opt-out.

Whenever an event has an "opt-out" mode, we'll treat it in "extended opt-out" mode instead of the historical "strict" opt-out.

Of course, strict opt-out is still available if you don't enable Extended opt-out from the library.