Data clean rooms show promise but brands struggle with measurement

Data clean rooms appear to be one answer to the decline of third-party cookies – a means of matching user-level data with a platform’s audience without compromising privacy – but a new IAB report finds that while some advertisers are using clean rooms for targeting, very few use them for measurement. 

Why it matters

With expansive data privacy regulations on both sides of the Atlantic, data clean rooms (DCRs) that purportedly allow audience-matching your first-party data to that of a publisher or platform without compromising privacy (or at least not contravening privacy rules) are often invoked as solutions. However, the IAB report depicts the big gap between theory and practice.

For an overview of WARC's insight on the topic, read What we know about post-cookie audience tracking.

Take-up with missed potential

The IAB’s State of Data 2023 report, based on a survey of 200 data decision-makers across brands, agencies, and publishers, finds that two-thirds of brands “leveraging privacy-preserving technology” used data clean rooms, a quite obscure way of putting it.

Just under half of the sample reported using clean rooms for data anonymisation and compliance.

Where users appear to lag most is in the area of measurement and attribution: under a third use data clean rooms for this purpose.

Issues

Search Engine Journal has a good explainer that uncovers some of the limitations:

• First, you need lots of first-party data.
• Different platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – tend to have their own DCRs, which creates complexity for advertisers working across platforms.

Alternative solutions

This complexity is part of the reason that brands are still learning to use this technology to replace the deeply flawed but broadly used cookie. Certain platforms have thrown their weight behind other identification techniques such as the Trade Desks open-source Unified ID 2.0, which Amazon and Disney have talked about supporting.

Sourced from IAB, WARC, Search Engine Journal