Engineering the post-cookie era: willhaben, IKEA Austria and Decentriq successfully implement first data clean room project in Austria

• The three companies were able to prove out an effective and secure method for targeting without the use of declining third-party cookies
• IKEA Austria’s driving principle was to treat customer data according to the strictest data protection criteria
• This pioneering project resulted in cost optimizations and performance uplifts using first-party data in a secure technical environment, compliant with data protection regulations

With the deprecation of third-party cookies, companies are losing one of the most common methods to reach potential customers in the digital space. Reaching a desired target group with precision is becoming much more difficult. willhaben recognized the need to operate independently of third-party cookies early on and implemented their own data management platform (DMP). 

“An essential component of our data-driven ad delivery is the data clean room solution from Decentriq,” says Jochen Schneeberger, Head of Digital Advertising at willhaben. “It allows us to make our high quality, first-party marketplace data available to our advertising customers for targeting in an environment compliant with data protection laws.” 

Schneeberger continues: “We’re happy that Ikea Austria could successfully test the data clean room solution with us and our technology partner Decentriq. An initial test in Spring 2024 has already resulted in several campaigns. Even after just a few days, we could see an uplift in several KPIs in the campaign performance results. We were able to achieve significant improvements of 20-30 percent on cost-per-visit, 15-20 percent on cost-per-action, and an average increase in ROAS of 10 percent.”

Data protection is paramount in first-party data use

IKEA Austria was able to use the diverse interests of willhaben users to generate new insights about their existing target groups and apply these findings to optimize the campaign. For example, they could match IKEA Austria’s first-party data segmented by a variety of characteristics — price segments, shopping cart values or entire target group segments such as “parents” — with audience interest data from willhaben, compliant with GDPR and in a secure technological environment. The intersections of data generated in this way were presented as an affinity index, which provided conclusions about new high-potential target groups or prospective new IKEA customers. 

“Data is the most valuable currency for businesses, and most of all in marketing,” says John Oakley, Country Marketing Manager at IKEA Austria. “This was particularly evident in the excellent campaign performance we were able to achieve together with willhaben.”

Oakley continues: “With the data clean room and our first-party marketplace data, we now have a solution in hand that shows us in detail where to reach and inspire potential IKEA customers on willhaben inventory — even where we wouldn’t have expected to look for them. This will enable us to target our advertising messages even more precisely in the future while maintaining the highest level of data protection.” 

Pioneering steps in the post-cookie era

Maximum data protection — what does that mean in concrete terms? Decentriq’s data clean room solution makes it possible to match and analyze first-party data in compliance with data protection regulations. Data partners maintain full autonomy of their own data during the entire process: each data partner only has access to their own data, from data upload to processing to generating insights. Thanks to advanced data privacy technologies, in particular confidential computing from Microsoft Azure, data is fully protected — even Decentriq as the data clean room provider can never access the data. The data clean room handles data processing and generates insights and targeting with AI algorithms. 

“As experts in secure data collaboration, we recognized the shift to the cookieless era early and developed a corresponding solution,” says Maximilian Groth, co-founder and CEO of Decentriq. “The Decentriq platform is already used internationally for successful first-party data collaborations. We’re excited to have proven the effectiveness of our solution in the first data clean room campaign in Austria, and thank our partners for their trust.”

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