year’s must-haves: Cleaner rooms and better data

Marketers and brands have been confronted over the years with a constantly changing landscape regarding identity and privacy regulations. Add to that Apple’s privacy restrictions as well as Google’s impending deprecation third-party cookies and everyone is dizzy trying keep their data-driven campaigns on the right track.

All these macro changes are designed to give consumers more control over their data but it is also making data driven marketing much trickier. Marketing teams are constantly updating their privacy policies and retooling their tech stacks to stay ahead of the curve.

Many mid-sized marketers have a poor understanding of clean rooms and if they can solve their problems.

What is a data room?

A data clean room, at its most basic, is a type privacy-enhancing technology that allows marketers to have a neutral and secure place where all consumer data can safely be anonymized, stored, and made available for various services.

Clean rooms can offer many services, but the most popular use cases are audience segmentation, audience overlap analysis, and acting as the conduit for measurement and attribution studies. All of this without compromising privacy or sharing personal identifiable information.

Clean rooms are a game-changing tool because they allow access to, availability, and data usage for many sources. The clean room provider enforces strict privacy rules. Marketers who want to work in this environment need to be concerned about data privacy.

Data suppliers in a cleanroom have complete control of their data. It is encrypted and anonymized during the onboarding process as well as audience building.

Clean rooms also allow for privacy-compliant querying across multiple activation channels, which allows marketers to create aggregate performance reports.

Let’s look closer at two common uses for data cleaning rooms.

Get deeper: Why clean data rooms

Use case: Second-party data and overlay analysis

Clean rooms allow customers to combine customer data from different brands in a safe environment. Based on customer profiles, engagement and conversion metrics, this shows what customers have in common.

Marketers can use this information to create second-party audiences and activate them. Both brands can create targeting lists based on anonymized customer data.

Data can also be layered with enterprise data providers. This allows for new insights that are based on key demographics and interest behavior, as well as other data points. This gives marketers more options to segment their customer lists and create more customized ad experiences that increase engagement and convert.

Get deeper: How companies use clean rooms and first party data as cookies to vanish

Use case: Measurement & Attribution

Privacy legislation, new restrictions regarding tracking users make it difficult to conduct basic measurement and attribution studies with any level of confidence.

In this instance, clean rooms are creating small walls that allow brands to partner with publishers to examine a consumer’s journey to purchase.

Here’s how it works.

• Marketers combine conversion data with publisher impression logs to create a new lens that allows them to determine if the 10,000,000 impressions they bought with participating publishers yielded the desired KPIs.
• The publisher collaborates with the marketer in order to bring onboard an anonymized file of all users who were exposed to the brand’s ads.
• The clean room, which has a central identifier, matches and analyses the data. This provides insight into campaign performance and allows for better decisions about campaign efficiency.

Clean rooms offer tailored solutions to make more use of first party data. Marketers can create, activate and track performance in order to achieve their data-driven marketing goals.

Clean rooms are only possible with a skilled team that has technical and analytical prowess.

Get deeper: Marketers turn to adtech agencies and adtech to address the addressability issue

Before you clean your room, here are some key points to remember

The overall customer file’s compliance and hygiene is another important aspect. A clean room contains all data that is federated. This means multiple sources of data can be used as one file. It is easier to create actionable and factual insights if your customer file is more accurate.

Marketers must take greater care to ensure accuracy of first-party information. Marketers must ensure that all data is stored in one place to create a comprehensive customer file. Here are some key questions you should ask clean room providers before deciding which one to choose:

• What marketing technology capabilities can you integrate with our existing stack?
• Are you able to integrate with tech solutions in order to make it easy to use your data?
• What data can be controlled in the clean room? Who will have access to it?
• How simple is it to use the clean room? Is it possible to use this and reap the benefits if we don’t have a team of data technologists?

We’ll be seeing more privacy and more limitations on legacy identifiers in 2023 and beyond.

Clean rooms will continue to grow in importance and become more important. Clean rooms will be more valuable than ever, making it possible to make the most out of their capabilities.

The post Next year’s must-do list: Cleaner rooms and better data was first published on MarTech.