Overview

Quantcast’s Verified by Q offers marketers a method to monitor the effectiveness of their Quantcast campaigns within Google Analytics (GA4/GA). Visits to the site linked to conversions driven by Quantcast will be sent to GA through GA’s Measurement Protocol (MP) API. These will be identified as the start of a session, enabling GA to account for these occurrences in Session-Sourced attribution and Key Event attribution. Verified by Q will appear as a new channel alongside the marketer’s current channel definitions.

Marketers will be able to view this in GA’s Traffic Acquisition Report and Attribution Path Report. This should help marketers understand view-through conversions from performance campaigns and conversions from performance CTV campaigns.

In the Traffic Acquisition Report, marketers can expect to see Sessions credited to Verified by Q over Direct/None when Quantcast drove the visit.

On the Attributions Path Report, marketers can expect to see a Key Event attributed to Verified by Q when Quantcast drove it.

Pre-requisites

• The marketer must have both the Quantcast Live Tag and the Google Tag on their website.

• The marketer has to opt in to the feature by sharing their Google Analytics Measurement ID and Measurement Protocol API Secret with Quantcast.

• The marketer’s Conversion Label in Quantcast must match the Key Event in GA.

How it works

Set up

Verified by Q integrates with the customer’s GA instance via the GA Measurement Protocol API. This API requires a marketer’s Measurement ID and Measurement Protocol API Secret. Customers will have the option to provide these two pieces of information in their Account Settings within the Platform, specifically Organizations Manager > Accounts. The presence of these will signal to Quantcast to start submitting MP events to the customer's GA instance.

It is important to ensure the correct combination of Measurement ID and Measurement Protocol API Secret is provided here. This will ensure Quantcast’s MP events are sent to the correct place in the customer’s GA4.

Marketers using server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) with FPID should refer to the Advanced setup for sGTM section for additional setup information.

Behind the Scenes

When a marketer implements this integration, here’s what happens:

1. A customer sees a marketer’s ad served by Quantcast on the open internet.

2. The same customer then visits the marketer’s website and performs the conversion action specified in the Quantcast campaign.

3. Quantcast’s attribution system identifies and determines the conversion action as a valid last-touch attribution within the configured attribution window.

4. Site visit associated with that conversion action is submitted to GA using the MP API.

5. GA will consider this in its Session-Sourced attribution and Key Event attribution, based on the marketer’s attribution settings in GA to apply credit to the source/medium.

6. Customers will now see “quantcast / conversions_campaign” as a new source/medium in their Traffic Acquisition Report and Attribution Path Report.

Note: Verified by Q is available only for Conversion and Traffic Objective campaigns.

What to expect in Google Analytics 4

We recommend looking at the Traffic Acquisition Report in GA. This report highlights the credits applied to various channels that drive traffic to your website. The MP event submitted by Quantcast allows GA to show a new Verified by Q channel. You should expect to see a new row when broken down by session source/medium, e.g., quantcast / conversions_campaign. You should now be able to use the report normally as you would, such as filtering down to a specific Key Event.

In addition, you can look at the Key Event Attribution Path Report in GA. This report highlights the user's path to triggering key events on your website and the distribution of credit across various channels along that path. The MP event submitted by Quantcast allows GA to show a new Verified by Q channel. You should expect to see a new value, e.g., quantcast / conversions_campaign.

Current Limitations

• Verified by Q can use GA Client ID or Google FPID to stitch MP events with website activity events. It will not work when:

  The marketer typically relies on User ID when using Google Ads Enhanced Conversions.

Advanced Setup for Server-side GTM with FPID

When a marketer is using only the web Google Tag Manager (GTM), Verified by Q will rely on the GA Client ID (GACID) to associate the Measurement Protocol (MP) event with website activity events in the marketer’s GA4. In cases where the marketer has both web- and server-side GTM and further relies on the GA First Party ID (FPID) as their identifier in GA4, additional setup is required for Verified by Q to work.

Marketers need to configure their sGTM to add a new Quantcast Tag, which will be available in the community template gallery. In addition, marketers need to configure their web GTM to connect to their sGTM and send consent signals. Once the web GTM and sGTM are set up correctly, Verified by Q will work normally. Installing this code will grant Quantcast access to your Google Analytics First Party ID, allowing you to integrate your Quantcast campaigns with your Google Analytics account.

Quantcast sGTM tag expects a cmpConsents variable in Event Data, an object containing consent settings for different consent frameworks. If you use TCF, you can pass CMP responses directly to our tag under cmpConsents.tcfApi object.

An example of cmpConsents may look like this:

{
"tcfApi": {
		gdprApplies: true,
		tcString: "CQk6zcA",
		purpose: {
consents: {1: true, 2: true, ...},
legitimateInterests: {1: false, ...}
},
vendor: {
	consents: {1: false, 2: false, ...},
disclosedVendors: {1: false, 2: false, 3: false, ...},
legitimateInterests: {1: false, 2: false, ...}
},
publisher: {
consents: {1: true, 2: true, ...}
legitimateInterests: {},
restrictions: {}
} 
}
}

The expected format matches the standard  __tcfapi response (TCData) as per IAB TCF Specs.

The same applies to cmpConsents.uspApi for USPrivacy framework’s USPData object:

{
tcfApi: { // for TCF data
		...
},
uspApi: { // for USPrivacy data
	uspString: "1YNN"
}
}

For more technical details about sGTM with FPID setup, please refer to the README in https://github.com/quantcast/gtm-measure-sst.