For years, the biggest technology players have been preparing us for data overload. Perhaps you remember declarations in the vein of, “more data has been created in the past two years than in the entirety of previous human history”. The creators of this data are governments, businesses, and now AI. But it is the citizen consumer that we talk about here.
Arab Gulf nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have already enacted laws to protect personally identifiable information (PII), which challenges the marketing professionals who rely on this data for personalisation of campaigns.
Alongside the increase of privacy-related regulations, the need for industry-wide collaboration is on the rise.
Marketers, who need to share data with third parties to analyse ROI on their campaigns, have turned to the data clean room. PII is anonymised in these rooms, and collaborators combine their first-party data with aggregated views of partners’ data.
When done properly, this ecosystem delivers value to all. It can be done through hyperscale providers in so-called “walled gardens” (where the provider retains a lot of control), or through the more flexible, vendor-neutral “pure play” clean room.
But only through data clean rooms do you get volume and quality (data depth), variety (data breadth), and the right mix of integration options to build a comprehensive analytics suite while remaining compliant.
Gartner predicts that four in five advertisers around the world with “media budgets of US$1 billion or more” will be using clean rooms by the end of this year. So, now that you are primed on the subject, it is time to take a look at the everyday use cases that can take marketing campaign measurement to new heights.
Performance measurement
Data clean rooms are ideal spaces for bringing together an advertiser’s CRM data with partners’ ad performance data. The advertiser uploads first-party data to the clean room following a campaign. Ad exposure data from a partner is made available by the clean room provider.
Advertisers can measure retention, average revenue per user (ARPU), lifetime value (LTV), and return on ad spend (ROAS). In this setup, there is enough information to determine what percentage of new customers can be attributed to each marketing channel.
Individualising audiences
Whether it is through government regulations or decisions by private companies – like Apple’s move with iOS 14’s app-tracking transparency (ATT) – getting access to user-level data is becoming more difficult.
Data clean rooms bring back granularity by gathering data from authorised third parties and segmenting it into groups by behaviour, demographics, and location. Not only is this a powerful option for data enrichment and analysis, but the clean room gets around the need for personal data to be owner-shared because sources are virtually connected.
Taking this approach allows more focused targeting of audiences by identifying shared characteristics across anonymised datasets. When marketing professionals can tailor content, promotions, recommendations, and new ad formats, ROI gets a significant boost.
Measuring reach and frequency more accurately
The data clean room provides advertisers with PII-level impression data from ad partners. When marketers can see what ads are being served to which customers and see the frequency of their appearance, they can use this information to enhance user experiences. They can optimise campaign reach and frequency by adjusting appearances to minimize ad fatigue.
The clean room also offers insights into the validity of segmentation, ensuring that the marketing team is targeting the right audience. Based on the findings, criteria can be changed to tweak the effectiveness of subsequent campaigns. The team can also examine the customer journey to discover if they are engaging potentials at the right point in the funnel by looking at how they interact with ads.
Measuring incrementality
Through the clean room, advertisers can blend impression data from publishers and audiences, with their own first-party response and conversion data to get user-level insights into the incremental impact of their marketing efforts.
They can compare the results of test and mediating groups by using A/B testing. They can also contrast the behaviours of exposed and unexposed groups. This all adds up to an exceedingly powerful toolbox for tweaking campaign effectiveness.
User quality sandboxes
This one is for publishers and advertisers. By uploading their user-level data to a clean room, publishers can allow advertisers to better understand where customers overlap and to measure user quality.
Advertisers, meanwhile, can test a pre-constructed audience against a range of publishers to determine the best investment route. These sandboxes are an advantage to both publishers and advertisers. They allow publishers to tweak their offerings and they allow advertisers to strategise more effectively in their campaigns.
First-party data partnerships
Instead of working together on a case-by-case basis, two entities could agree to combine their datasets in a compliant environment governed by permissions. First-party data partnerships create great value in the media ecosystem because the product they offer is richer in context than any one data partner could achieve.
Secured cross-analysis has the potential to optimize product development and empower marketing teams to fine-tune their strategy.
Data for training, inference, and propensity
Data clean rooms allow marketing entities to regain access to restricted granular user-level data that will allow them to run training, inference, and even propensity models.
These are effective in predicting the likelihood of different user behaviors and are therefore invaluable to marketing analysts and user experience designers.
Schooled and prepped
I hope you now see the potential of the data clean room for fine-tuning your ability to measure marketing ROI in a privacy-minded region. The ideas presented here scratch the surface of a universe of possibilities for brand builders as they look to reach the right audience.
By Paul Wright, general manager – Western Europe and MENAT at AppsFlyer
