As we covered in a previous article, decentralised data clean rooms are unlocking new opportunities for advertisers, including the development of more effective lookalike models. In a future post, we’ll deep dive into how data clean rooms can power more accurate people-based marketing strategies. However, one of the challenges for advertisers is accurately measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to report on return on investment (ROI).
Marketing campaigns utilise multiple advertising channels, including display, TV, audio and out-of-home. To effectively measure the ROI of these campaigns, it is necessary to be able to correlate marketing activity to specific areas of revenue growth. It is therefore important that marketers have access to rich data across each of these channels to enable the creation of reliable attribution models.
Measurement of marketing ROI is promoted as a key use case for data clean rooms. This is because the clean room can act as a neutral environment to analyse both advertiser CRM data and ad exposure data provided by the marketing platforms.
But can these data clean room solutions deliver across all available channels?
Measuring marketing ROI in centralised data clean rooms
Current data clean room solutions on the market, such as those offered by the walled gardens, are capable of providing campaign measurement functionality.
Through these solutions, advertisers upload their first-party data following a campaign into the provider’s data clean room. They are then able to conduct analysis across their customer data and the ad exposure data made available by the data clean room provider. For example, comparing recent purchase data against the ad exposure data provided by Google in Ads Data Hub. Through this analysis, it is possible to attribute a percentage of new customers to the marketing activity conducted across Google’s various advertising channels.
There are a couple of challenges with this approach. Firstly, while this does offer measurement functionality, it still only provides a siloed view. This is because each of these solutions is limited to their own particular channel. For example, the various Google advertising channels as shown above. It does not allow for a holistic understanding of the effectiveness of their marketing activity.
Secondly, these data clean rooms are built on a centralised database structure. This means it is a requirement for each data owner to upload personal data into a third-party environment. As we covered in a previous article, this brings with it significant privacy and security challenges.
Fortunately, a new approach has emerged that allows all these various advertising worlds to be analysed in a single view, enabling accurate measurement across an entire marketing universe.
InfoSum’s decentralised approach to measurement
InfoSum’s data clean room solution is built on our pioneering decentralised identity infrastructure. This unique approach allows any number of data sources to be seamlessly analysed, without requiring any personal data to be shared, centralised or moved at all.
Through InfoSum, an advertiser is able to upload their CRM data into their own isolated and standalone Bunker. Additionally, each media owner or platform is able to upload their addressable audience into their own Bunker.
Rather than requiring the personal data to be shared to conduct analysis, InfoSum enables multiple Bunkers to be virtually connected through anonymous mathematical representations.
This enables marketers to measure the intersection that exists between their target audience, and the various media owner audiences. Firstly, this empowers marketers to understand the optimum route to reach their audience, enabling them to plan more effective marketing campaigns. Secondly, it unlocks omnichannel marketing measurement.
Following the delivery of their marketing campaign, the advertiser is able to update their Bunker with CRM data, including a unique identifier (email, postal address, mobile ID etc.) and purchase date. Additionally, each media owner is able to include ad exposure data in their Bunker, including the unique identifier used to create the campaign audience.
The advertiser is now able to accurately measure the intersection between new customers and those exposed to the advertising across each media owner. The advertiser can, therefore, determine what percentage of new customers that can be attributed to each channel.
Getting started with omnichannel measurement and attribution
To get started with omnichannel planning, measurement and attribution, the first step is to select a data clean room solution. Key buying considerations include whether the solution is privacy-by-design, therefore ensuring customer personal data is protected at all times. And whether control of your data is sacrificed by requiring data to be shared into a third-party environment.
InfoSum offers the only decentralised data clean room that powers end-to-end data onboarding, the ability to build powerful data alliances and enable access to second-party audiences. Combined, this unlocks the ability to effectively plan and measure omnichannel marketing campaigns.
