More and more media is bought with specific (online) goals in mind. Being able to tie the conversion event back to the original sources (impressions or clicks on ads) is necessary to allocate budgets optimally.
This is easy to do if both the showing of the ad and the click happen on the same publisher, like for instance, Facebook; and it is very hard, if the user starts on an independent publisher, sees an ad that was served by an ad network which used their own click tracker, and lands on the marketer site, navigates through the site and eventually clicks on a product or signs up to a service.
The Open Web has to be able to share some level of data, in order to connect these four independent events: impression, click, landing page, conversion.
Good news is that conversion tracking is not user profiling, so it is not actually against the spirit of the law. The bad news is, that the same methodology as user tracking is used also to do conversion attribution, and that gets blocked because of profiling.
Conversion tracking and attribution modelling will be hurt, unless the different browsers and OS will decide to allow for privacy proof attribution. Currently both main browsers, Safari and Chrome are testing first versions of conversion tracking support, and there is no real talk about enabling more complex attribution models.
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