Today, consumers are empowered to shop, read, listen and watch however and wherever they’d like, which generates more ways to digitally interact with brands than ever before. And while more channels and media options offer marketers rich opportunities to build connections with customers, they also increase the complexity of decision-making.
Adding to these challenges are changes to advertising addressability. To navigate these industry changes, many advertisers are building more direct customer relationships, and investing in first-party data management technologies. Data clean room solutions also play an important role in extending transparency and choice to advertisers.
What a data clean room is
Data clean rooms help advertisers leverage insights and custom analysis in a privacy-safe manner. They help advertisers design and execute assessments that are tailored to their needs. Advertisers can better prepare, activate, and evaluate their advertising campaigns by using rich signals from multiple parties, including the advertiser’s own first-party relationship data. This provides advertisers with a custom lens to comprehend different aspects of their marketing efforts—from planning to measuring and improving performance.
Why clean rooms are important for insight-driven marketing
The ongoing industry changes around ad addressability will continue to impact how marketers operate with data, and are rendering prior methods obsolete. As we look to the future, data clean rooms are a durable way to continue operating effectively across channels.
By combining pseudonymous datasets across multiple sources, marketers can overcome silos and obtain a more holistic view of the customer journey. At the same time, they can hone in on media attribution, audience segmentation and more.
For example, marketers could run a cross-channel attribution analysis to understand which channel investments show up most often on customers’ path to conversion and which are more cost-efficient in driving sales.
Another common way to leverage clean rooms is for media mix analysis—this helps marketers understand not just which single channel is useful, but what combination of channels will help maximize results.
We have also seen marketers add first-party datasets, such as engagements on their brand website, sales at DTC stores or pseudonymized audiences, to clean rooms for a more thorough analysis. This helps them discover audiences with strong purchase intent, understand engagement journeys and then design channel activation plans accordingly.
Data clean rooms are typically easy to use, with interfaces and patterns that are familiar to data analysts, strategists and engineers. This benefits a variety of roles across a marketing organization, from data scientists and analysts who are hands-on users of the tool, to brand strategists and media planners who leverage these insights to design and execute marketing campaigns.
How clean rooms can best serve a brand’s insight agenda
Begin with a list of concrete questions to answer, or assumptions to validate, and strategically rely on templates and standard use cases offered by clean room providers to jumpstart your findings. After a little practice, consider building tailored learning agendas, developing custom reporting and even creating your own query templates. This helps deepen your learnings and accelerate your analytic executions.
Since launching in early 2021, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon Ads’ data clean room technology, has helped thousands of advertisers achieve greater clarity into audience relevance, media performance and channel engagement across the customer journey. We’ve also found that many of our customers are going deeper into AMC’s functionalities to explore patterns, causations and correlations between different marketing factors to help generate actionable and insightful learnings. In addition, many Amazon Ads partner agencies and tool providers have developed dedicated AMC services and applications, and you can also engage with them to facilitate or further elevate your AMC usage.
Learn more about how brands are leveraging the power of insights to drive effective cross-channel advertising with Amazon Marketing Cloud.
