If you work in marketing, it’s likely that you’ve heard “ID graphs” and “data clean rooms” mentioned recently.
It’s possible that you only have a shaky grasp of what these things actually are, and how they work together.
Never fear! We’re going to break it down simply for you.
There’s been an ongoing shift from third-party cookies to privacy-first solutions, and that has sparked greater interest in “identity solutions” like ID graphs and data clean rooms (DCRs).
These technologies give marketers a way to maintain reliable, privacy-compliant audience targeting and measurement now that traditional data tracking methods are losing relevance.
Simply put, an ID graph is a sophisticated mapping system that links multiple identifiers associated with a single person across various devices and channels.
These identifiers might be email addresses, device IDs, phone numbers, cookies, and other unique signals that, when combined, stitch together a more cohesive view of a customer.
This is key for omnichannel marketing, where an experience across devices is essential to driving engagement and conversions.
Data clean rooms are a secure (and privacy-compliant) environment for brands and publishers to share and analyze first-party data without exposing personally identifiable information (PII, in marketing lingo).
The end result is enriched customer profiles and audience segmentation, all of which still follows privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
ID graphs and data clean rooms are complementary technologies that give marketers an effective and privacy-compliant way to understand their audiences.
The ID graph stitches together fragmented data to create unified customer profiles, while the data clean room offers a secure environment where this data can be safely shared, enhanced, and analyzed.
Let’s look at how things typically play out, in three steps.
The first step involves collecting first-party data from various touchpoints—emails, website visits, app usage, and so on.
The data is then uploaded into a data clean room using a secure and privacy-compliant process. The beauty of a data clean room is that the data never leaves this environment—even when collaborating with other data sources‚—and it remains anonymized the whole time.
Once the data clean room is set up, the data can be mapped to an ID graph.
This creates a comprehensive profile that gives marketers a clear view of the customer across devices and platforms (even if the customer is not identified as “Bill Richardson from Cleveland, Ohio”).
Once the ID graph has consolidated the data, the enriched person-level profiles can be viewed in the data clean room and can be used for collaboration with publishers or other third-party data providers to further enrich these profiles—without exposing raw data or PII.
Marketers can now activate these audiences across different channels.
ID graphs allow for precise targeting and re-targeting across devices, while the clean room facilitates accurate measurement and attribution.
Marketers can analyze performance metrics within the clean room to ensure that their campaigns are delivering the desired results, all while maintaining consumer privacy.
Let’s recap some reasons why marketers should be leveraging the potentials of ID graphs and data clean rooms.
As consumer privacy regulations become stricter and third-party cookies potentially phase out, marketers can benefit from compliant solutions like ID graphs and data clean rooms.
There’s no better way to activate on first-party data, while remaining privacy compliant, then combining ID graphs with data clean rooms.
ID graphs help link user data across different devices and channels, so that brands can deliver consistent messaging and experiences.
Data clean rooms make cross-platform measurement possible, so that marketers can determine how effective a campaign was without compromising consumers’ privacy.
By gathering data from multiple places in a clean room, marketers can analyze the entire customer journey, track conversion events, and better attribute sales to specific marketing decisions.
Data clean rooms don’t just protect privacy—they also open new revenue streams. Companies can use clean rooms to safely monetize their first-party data, adding layers of attributes before selling it on to trusted partners.
Stagwell announced in May that it was partnering with Nexxen to power Stagwell Marketing Cloud (SMC) products with Nexxen’s proprietary unified identity graph.
This partnership lets SMC combine and dedupe identifiers across its vast network of data, helping to effectively and efficiently target audiences, and future-proofing existing data as the landscape evolves.
With the Nexxen ID graph supporting various SMC products, including CUE—and the introduction of SMC data clean rooms—SMC is now able to offer an end-to-end solution for agencies that want to understand, analyze, and activate audiences in a safe and compliant environment.
