Google Signals and Privacy in Google Analytics 4
Google Signals is the proprietary technology that Google uses to recognize an individual user as they travel the Internet. This post will explain how Google Signals is used in Google Analytics 4, and the implications for user privacy.
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Updating to reflect the deprecation of Google Signals from reporting identity, and also migrating this post from ken-williams.com at the same time.
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Modified language around modeled data now that behavioral modeling and conversion modeling have been released.
As I write this in 2020, Digital Analytics platforms have been around for about 15 years, and they all basically share the same functionality and features. However, Google has been building an ace up their sleeve since 2004 that the others cannot replicate: 1.8 billion gmail accounts.
What is Google Signals?
Unless a friend printed this blog post and faxed it to you, there is a good chance that you’re logged in to Google right now. Gmail and Google Chrome are outrageously popular. To give you an idea, Chrome makes up 66% of the web browser market (source) and about ¼ of humans have a gmail account (source).
As a result, Google is very good at recognizing you across all of your devices, and you benefit from this in a variety of ways. If you’re like me, you might use your Google account to log in to a variety of websites. You probably also benefit from a seamless experience across mobile and desktop devices when you use Google products. And of course, Google uses this to target ads that are personalized to your interests and demographics (which is arguably a benefit).
Google Signals launched in July 2018, and it allows marketers to recognize users on their website who are not logged-in by leveraging Google’s identity software. This does not provide the marketer with any personally identifiable information, but allows them to do three things:
Demographic & Interest Reporting - Google Analytics can use Google Signals to retrieve attributes about the users who visit your website or app from Google's data management platform. This includes Google's best guess about your sex, age, and the products you are most likely to purchase in the near future.
Conversion Tracking - Google Ads knows when a user views or clicks on an advertisement, and Google Analytics knows when that user completes a conversion on your website or mobile app. When the two are integrated, Google Signals is used to identify the user so that data can be blended between the two tools.
Audience List Sharing - Similarly, if you create an audience in Google Analytics (for example, all users who added an item to the cart but did not complete a purchase) then Google Signals makes it possible to share this list of customers back to Google Ads for remarketing.
So, in summary, Google Signals is used to identify individual users so that Google's products can integrate with one another.
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| Google Signals is not enabled by default (more on why below). To enable it in GA4, go to Data Settings > Data Collection in the property settings section of your Admin menu. |
When Google Analytics 4 was initially launched in 2020, Google Signals was also eligible for use as a Reporting Identity. This allowed the reports in Google Analytics 4 to use the Google Signals identifiers instead of the cookie-based client ID, and it allowed marketers to understand how frequently a single user was accessing the site from different devices even if the user was unauthenticated.
Google deprecated this functionality on February 12, 2024, as you can see in the new Reporting Identity options now available:
Privacy in Google Analytics 4
Google provides two options for individual with Google accounts. They may turn off personalization or install the Analytics opt-out Add-on, the Google Analytics accounts that run on the websites and applications that they visit will not be able to use Google Signals for any of the three items described above:
- Demographic & Interest Reporting
- Conversion Tracking
- Audience List Sharing
For those individuals authenticated to a Google account with personalization enabled, their data will appear in Google Analytics, but it will be subject to thresholding limitations. This means that the marketers will only be able to view data that has been aggregated over large groups of users, and will not be able to determine the attributes of any single user.
Google provides a broad range of user-privacy features for those marketers who are concerned about protecting the personal data of their users (originally outlined by Senior Product Manager Dan Stone in July 2020):
- You can opt-out of Google Signals
- You have the option to accept or reject the Data Processing Terms
- Enable IP anonymization
- Partially or completely disable data collection on the client side
- Select how long user-level and event-level data is stored
- Select what data can be shared with the Google support team
- Control ads personalization for your entire Analytics property, for specific countries, for specific events and user properties, or for an individual event or session
- Submit a request to delete data for a time period, for an individual user, or for an entire Analytics property
