Data Clean Rooms: Manage and Expand Data Access and Measurement

Goodway Group Guide

Data Clean Rooms: Manage and Expand Data Access and Measurement PREPARED BY

ALEX BLOORE VP, Product & Data AND

STEVEN URGO Senior Data Insights Analyst at Goodway Group November 2023

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The Rise of Data Clean Rooms In its infancy, the web was an open ecosystem where information flowed freely. Cookies have long powered personalized experiences across the web. However, while marketers and publishers have been able to pool and aggregate data to track and measure their audiences, consumer privacy has been impacted.

As new policies governing internet privacy including GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) emerge, large tech platforms including Google, Facebook and Amazon have established themselves as “walled gardens,” closing off data access and sunsetting tracking technologies like third-party cookies. Plus, other independent software platforms have launched, and cloud infrastructure companies are offering their own data clean rooms, too.

While a welcome step for consumer privacy, this approach has created disruption in the digital advertising industry around two major questions: First, how can brands continue to deliver on consumers’ expectations for personalized experiences in a privacy-safe manner? And second, how can marketers understand the impact of their media campaigns — and measurably achieve ROI — with these data clean rooms and across the open web?

What Is a Walled Garden?

A walled garden is an environment that controls a consumer’s access to site content and services, directing the user’s navigation within specific areas and allowing access to some material, but not all. An example is when school or corporate internet systems block user access to certain websites.

Additionally, these dominant platforms must also contend with anti-competitive implications brought on by restricting access by third parties to user data for advertising purposes, while reserving such data for their own use.

Welcome to the rise of the data clean room.

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What Is a Data Clean Room?

A data clean room is a privacy-first enclosed system. The Switzerland of data, it’s a neutral environment where two parties — a provider that offers data and a consumer that wants to query this data — can securely share and analyze data with full control of how, where and when the data can be used.

In technical terms, clean room environments overlap a brand’s first-party data with secure privacy-compliant impression-level data aggregated from the open internet and the specific platform’s data. User-level data goes into the clean room, and aggregated insights come out in a comingled audience group called a cohort.

Aggregated Consumer Analysis + Results

Advertiser-Owned Data Clean Room Vehicle Segment

Sport Affinity

2nd-Party Data

Vehicle Segment

Sport Affinity

Total

SUV

Soccer

10,777

Sedan

Soccer

7,345

Truck

Football

11,700

Truck

Swimming

30

Disallow

This allows brands to securely match their first-party data with a partner like Amazon’s or Google’s data for developing insights, identifying new targeting opportunities and creating efficiencies through audience segmentation.

That’s because you can run custom queries against event-level data that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to access, which you can then use in advanced analyses such as Channel Overlap and User Path To Conversion.

At the same time, this approach limits a brand’s ability to aggregate and measure performance across sites, platforms and online channels.

Functionality will differ among the major players. And while the walled gardens will grow stronger, the advertising ecosystem and attribution may weaken due to the closed nature of this approach.

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Why Clean Rooms Are Important More and more advertisers are exploring clean room strategies because of five main factors: 1. An increased consumer focus on data privacy 2. The move towards privacy by design

Marketers: Access Premium Data From Partners

3. Tightening data privacy regulations 4. The rising demand for data-driven insights 5. Better data governance and data security In digital media measurement, event-level data is the bedrock of the most complex questions you want to answer. Clean rooms offer advertisers the best path to query media data — typically at the event or user level — and combine it with customer data in a privacy-safe way. All data clean room platforms contain various privacy features to protect the anonymity of individual users, such as restricting the exposure of user IDs in results and requiring aggregate results to clear a minimum threshold of unique users.

Once you query the data, you can join and blend this data with your customer data however works best to answer the desired questions.

Finally, data clean rooms remove some of the weight of data engineering from advertisers. Instead of warehousing billions of rows of impression-level and conversion-level data, you can query that directly from Google, Amazon or Meta’s data warehousing via the clean room.

Advertisers run custom queries in provider media data using a data clean room.

• •

Aggregated performance data Event-level/log-level data

Advertisers access the provider’s data safely.

•

Data clean room platforms protect anonymity of individual user data with privacy features.

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How Can Data Clean Rooms Help You?

• Discover rich insights about your customers • Understand audience overlaps with key publishers • Improve media ROAS Publishers: Unlock Revenue Potential • Increase the value of your audience with strategic partners • Maintain premium CPMs • Increase share of spend • Provide advanced analytics and measurement for your partners

Advertisers can maximize data.

•

•

Quickly understand high-level trends using aggregated data.

Join their own customer data with the provider’s event-level data in safe ways.

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Key Clean Room Providers

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What Brands Can Do Now Before you begin planning your data clean room strategy, keep these major considerations in mind: •

Almost all walled garden clean rooms are “day forward.” Data will only be available from the day that you set up the instance. This means you want to set up your instance as early as possible to start gathering data.

•

You can’t architect this without expertise. You’ll need technical resources that understand complex data models and relationships between different identity spaces. Examples include advanced SQL users, data analysts and a clean room SME.

•

Have an intent. Don’t just decide to start working in clean rooms because you “need to” — what is the specific question you have?

•

No one clean room is the exact same. Each clean room environment has different requirements that you’ll need to understand for your strategy, as well as potential limitations when it comes to the exact loglevel data you can access.

•

It’s time-consuming to set up, test and analyze data. In some cases, it could take weeks or longer to get insights so that you know how to act.

A Complete Contextual Targeting Guide for Digital Marketing With cookie deprecation and increased privacy legislation, contextual targeting has reemerged as a popular cookieless targeting solution.

Discover why.

Explore Contextual Targeting >

Once you’ve considered these factors, identify a hypothesis that can only be answered in a clean room. It’s best to start small — for example, with the walled garden you’re buying the most in. Work with that partner, whether it’s Google, Amazon, Meta, Roku or someone else, to set up a clean room instance.

Goodway Group’s data and analytics team partners with the most relevant clean room providers, helping solve brands’ largest business questions about media performance and helping brands gain critical audience insights.

What Key Data Questions Do You Want to Answer?

Whether you want to conduct cross-channel media analyses, understand how media is impacting sales or activate audiences in a certain platform, we can help. Contact us to get a data strategy assessment — and identify which tools will get you the outcomes that you’re looking for.

Let’s talk today at info@goodwaygroup.com.

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