An important observation: the value of personas in Web analytics is likely to increase with the current changes in digital privacy. This is because the platforms need to move into more non-personified systems and methods. Personas are exactly about this: making individual customer data aggregated.
In fact, Google planned a system (that they already sort of cancelled a couple weeks ago, but nonetheless something similar will be developed) called Federated Learning of Cohort (FLOC) that was based on creating idealized interest profiles of users that would then be offered for advertisers instead of any individual level information (i.e., the cookie does not tell that User XYZ is visiting, instead it’s “User who is into Travel and Experiences”).
Conceptually, these models approach personas. Personas can therefore contribute to this process of privacy-protected customer understanding. How this contributions exactly takes place, is still unclear.