This is specific to Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) Advertising Audiences integrations. For Marketing Cloud’s Ad Studio product, please refer to the knowledge article here.

Google announced in September that there would be upcoming changes to support the European Economic Area (EEA) Digital Markets Act (DMA). These changes only impact marketers loading customer data containing records referencing customers residing in the EEA. If your customer data is not intended to target users in the EEA, no action is required.

In short, Google has added new “Consent Status” requirements for each individual’s user data in segments delivered via all Customer Match products (including Google Ads, DV360, and Google Ad Manager) in response to the EEA Digital Markets Act. Google now requires that marketers provide explicit signals regarding the opt-in/opt-out/undeclared consent status of consumers on customer match lists. 

Based on Google’s documentation here, Google is now provisioning users based on 2 new “Consent Status” settings:

The three available settings for consent on each field (Ad_user_data and Ad_personalization) are GRANTED, DENIED, or UNSPECIFIED. For each individual profile, customers will need to provide a value for both Ad_user_data and Ad_personalization in the customer contact record in Data 360, and map those to their respective values, “AdUserDataConsentStatus” and “AdPersonalizationConsentStatus.” These attributes will then need to be selected when creating activations to Google Ads. The status needs to map to a boolean value (or NULL) as follows:

• GRANTED = 1

• DENIED = 0

• UNSPECIFIED: Best practice guidance for Unspecified consent is to leave the field NULL. Unmapped attributes are also treated as Unspecified and NULL. That said, anything other than a 1 or a 0 will be treated as UNSPECIFIED. 

This mapping process will be GA by February 26, 2024. You may begin uploading consent data immediately into Data 360, but mapping consent to your current/new activations (based on the screenshot above) will be available in the UI by February 26, 2024. 

What Google has communicated to us: To target EU/EEA subjects, "GRANTED" is required for BOTH of the consent fields, else EEA users will effectively be dropped via the matching process and unavailable for targeting. 

Based on that guidance, we will initially be taking a reductive approach to consent delivery to Google. This means that we will take the more restrictive of the two explicit consent fields we receive from customers, per the table below. If two values are present for a single consent field, we will take the more restrictive of the two (in other words, if you have “GRANTED” and DENIED” both mapped to ad_user_data, we will select and send DENIED to Google for that consent field).  As Google’s feature evolves, we will send the consent fields separately. 

Please note that consent is set at a user level, within each delivered segment, so updates to a user’s membership within one segment will not affect other segments in Google. 

DENIED

• Users with DENIED consent will be deleted from all existing Customer Match audiences worldwide, and filtered out of new activations prior to delivery. 

GRANTED: 

• To target EU/EEA subjects, "GRANTED" is required for BOTH of the consent fields, else EEA users will effectively be dropped via the matching process and unavailable for targeting. 

UNSPECIFIED: 

• Unspecified users will only be added to Customer Match audiences in the Google platform if Google has determined they are non-EEA residents. This is the default consent status applied to users if no action is taken.

Google acts on these signals at the time the user specific data is received. When you edit your existing activations to provide the new consent mappings, upon saving, we will initiate a full refresh, whereby all current segment members will be resent to Google along with their corresponding consent values.