Do you need a Data Clean Room for your advertising campaigns?

2
May
2023
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It’s all over the news: for several months now, discussions about the end of third-party cookies have been growing, and the digital advertising world is getting agitated.

In this context, many companies are looking for solutions to continue to measure the performance of their campaigns in a reliable way.

In these debates, one tool seems to stand out: the Data Clean Room.

What is it? Do you need it for your advertising campaigns? We answer those questions in this concrete article, which will enlighten you on the usefulness of this type of platform.

A phone displays an image of a secure data room with a data sheet and a padlock, emphasizing data protection.

What is a Data Clean Room? 

A Data Clean Room is a closed and secured environment that allows two entities to upload and centralize their data in a single platform. Thus, it allows two entities to connect and reconcile their data for measurement and analysis purposes.

In Data Clean Rooms, the uploaded data is anonymized, allowing it to be perfectly RGPD-compliant. For example, on Google's Ads Data Hub, the platform automatically blocks anything that could allow the identification of a specific user (such as queries that are too sensitive, or data samples that are too small).

Note that a Data Clean Room is a neutral environment, where both entities can access each other's data, without either of them controlling the platform. Thus, neither of the two parties can modify or transform the data present on the platform.

Why use a Data Clean Room?

There are several use cases for a Data Clean Room, which you need to know about if you want to exploit this type of infrastructure in your digital strategy.

“If Data Clean Rooms can be interesting solutions to the performance measurement restrictions foreseen with the end of third-party cookies, advertisers should remain cautious. Indeed, even if these platforms have a real value in terms of secure data sharing and predictive insights, they require an expertise in data handling. Make sure you get an expert to help you choose the right Data Clean Room according to the uses you want to make of it, but also to use it in a relevant way.” Fenitra Raz AdTech & Data Strategist, Gamned!

Use case #1: Performance measurement and attribution

First of all, thanks to a Data Clean Room, you can measure the real impact of your media activations to optimize your investments.

This way, you can reconcile online and offline data, in a web-to-store and drive-to-store logic, to efficiently measure in-store visits and conversions.

Here is another use case related to this performance measurement: you can measure the most effective conversion paths (i.e. the marketing attribution of your campaigns), by matching the first party data in your CRM with the advertising ID.

Use case #2: Collecting consumer insights

Second interesting use case: taking advantage of the data collaboration that Data Clean Rooms allow to carry out studies, and better qualify your customers. You can thus carry out behavioral or predictive analyses on your audience.

Use case #3: Media activation

In this last use case, you can unify first, second and third-party data to build and expand your audiences, in order to improve the targeting of your campaigns

Indeed, thanks to a Data Clean Room, an advertiser and an advertising platform can share their data, without any security or privacy risk. Note that this is currently only possible on some Data Clean Rooms, such as Google’s, Amazon’s, and LiveRamp’s.

What are the differences between a Data Clean Room and a Data Management Platform?

The two are similar in appearance, but a Data Clean Room is not really a Data Management Platform (DMP).

First of all, a DMP reconciles data based on an ID such as a cookie or an email, while a Data Clean Room can use any type of identifier but in an anonymized way. Thus, a Data Clean Room will not be impacted by a cookieless world, whereas a DMP will.

What's more, a DMP is used to segment and activate data, while a Data Clean Room is used to measure and analyze it (for attribution purposes, or to gather insights and predictions).

Which players offer Data Clean Rooms?

The Data Clean Rooms ecosystem is quite large - you need to know each of the features these platforms can offer, to choose the one that will suit your uses. 

Some players offer Data Clean Rooms for advertisers to collaborate with other platforms and measure the performance of their campaigns. This is the case of :

  • Retency
  • Appsflyer
  • Snowflake
  • Infosum

Other companies will offer Data Clean Rooms to measure and then activate data, such as:

  • Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH), created in 2017
  • Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), created in 2019
  • LiveRamp’s SafeHeaven 

What are the benefits and limits of a Data Clean Room?

The reason many companies choose to have a Data Clean Room is because they offer a number of benefits.

In addition to facilitating the sharing of second party data, a Data Clean Room meets the functionality of the third party cookie for performance measurement, and allows brands to gain insights. By doing so, they can evaluate and adjust their marketing actions in the best possible way. 

But Data Clean Rooms also have limitations:

  • They remain intermediate platforms, as DMPs can be.
  • The costs of these platforms can be high, depending on the modules you need.
  • Human costs also need to be anticipated, because the handling of a Data Clean Room requires a specific expertise. To do so, you’ll need data analysts, because these platforms are much more technical than Google Ads or Google Analytics platforms. They are similar to relatively complex databases.

Need an expert to help you set up a Data Clean Room that will help you optimize the performance of your campaigns and its measurement? Contact a Gamned! expert now, and let's talk about your project.

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