• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 8, 2021

Online advertising just became a bit more complex. Steven Urgo, data insights analyst at Goodway Group, believes every marketer working with data to run campaigns pulling in data should know something about the language from Microsoft built to manage and store information.

The number of data cleanrooms have grown in the past year, from Amazon Marketing Cloud or Google Data Hub, to Roku and LiveRamp Safe Haven. There is also one from Facebook on the way, Urgo said. The cleanroom enables brands to run queries and reporting against user-level data without exposing any individual IDs or information.

There are typically rows of data for every impression served in an advertising campaign. Every impression has a user ID associated with it, along with other information. “I don’t need to see the user ID, but I do need that type of data to do attribution, tie impression back to a conversion,” Urgo said. “You can write a SQL query without having to look at the user IDs, so it’s very privacy safe. Many times, the cleanrooms have rules on the types of reports the agency can pull, eliminating privacy concerns while being to tell the stories.”

Cleanrooms also enable marketers to upload first-party transaction information as well as the ability to match it against advertising impressions exposures without having to work with consumer personal information.

The agency Goodway Group supported SpoonfulONE, a science-backed line of nutritional products that makes food allergen introduction and maintenance safe, to help accelerate the company’s customer acquisition strategy using insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud.

The emerging brand in the niche baby nutritional product category needed a marketing plan to increase audience reach and customer acquisition. In Q4 2020, SpoonfulONE began working with Goodway Group to devise and optimize its marketing strategy. Goodway's expertise in Amazon Sponsored ads, Amazon DSP, and advanced measurement and analytics tools such as Amazon Marketing Cloud, helped SpoonfulONE use Amazon media and achieve consistent business growth.

It wasn't until May 2021 that the companies began working with Amazon's cleanroom.

Goodway Group first helped SpoonfulONE activate audiences by running prospecting and remarketing campaigns on Amazon DSP and Sponsored ads.

While key metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversion rate in standard reporting captured media performance at campaign level, these data points were not enough to help analysts understand how different media worked together to drive conversion and improve overall media efficiency.

Accessing cross-media insights became essential to making informed decisions around media-mix optimization and budget-allocation adjustment.

Using AMC, Goodway analyzed the conversion lift after reaching audiences through multiple media types, examined whether using prospecting and remarketing tactics jointly improved sales, and inspected the impact of connecting with audiences on desktop and mobile devices.

The purchase rate of customers who were exposed to display and Sponsored Products ads was three times higher than those who were exposed to Sponsored Products ads alone. More than half of all customers who made a purchase were reached by display ads and Sponsored Products ads.

The agency also discovered a nearly 13-times lift in purchase rate for users reached by both prospecting and remarketing ads compared to those reached by remarketing alone. In addition, connecting with customers on both desktop and mobile devices yielded a purchase rate four times higher than connecting with customers on mobile devices only.

“It let us show the upper-funnel tactics like prospecting,” he said. “Users are exposed to a much higher rate when using both.”

He said everyone in the industry knew the metrics didn’t tell the entire story, the last ad shouldn’t get all the credit if someone saw five ads.

Using log-level data reporting and querying in SQL is a necessary step, he said. Doing it in a cleanroom is in response to ensuring that everything is done with privacy standards.