IKEA and willhaben use Decentriq to run cookieless campaign with significant performance boost

The declining availability of third-party data meant IKEA Austria was looking for a future-proof, privacy-compliant solution to continue targeting the right customers.

The home furnishing leader realized that the right technology could help them put their rich collection of first-party data to use in a way that complemented targeting via third-party data.

High-quality first-party data has become a prized commodity in this new era of marketing. So it was important for IKEA that any solution they implemented be both compliant with regulations around customer data as well as maintain the distinct competitive edge any company with well-maintained first-party data has.

IKEA was set to run an awareness and consideration campaign with willhaben, Austria’s largest digital marketplace. For maximum flexibility in first-party data activation between brand and publisher, IKEA and willhaben opted to use a data clean room for their collaboration. But finding one that met everyone’s needs was key: The right data clean room would allow the brand to also make use of willhaben’s first-party data when generating target audiences for their campaign. 

willhaben is an important media partner for IKEA, as the Austrian digital marketplace offers various categories that are also interesting for IKEA customers. This made Decentriq’s audience insight capabilities particularly interesting for the partners: By uploading its CRM data to the clean room and overlapping this with first-party data  from willhaben, IKEA was able to see which of willhaben’s audiences have the highest affinity with their own customers.

Through this collaboration, IKEA discovered new segments on willhaben that they were unaware were relevant for their potential customers. Then, they purchased the segments with the highest affinities to advertise to on willhaben. In doing so, IKEA made significant progress in moving towards data-driven segment selection — as opposed to intuitive segment selection.

During all this, full data sovereignty was guaranteed: No party using a Decentriq clean room can ever view or have access to the other’s data — not even Decentriq as the operator of the platform.

A digital advertising agency conducted a performance campaign on behalf of IKEA on willhaben which showed promising results after just a few days. The segments with the highest affinity in Decentriq were tested against previously used, traditionally (intuitively) purchased data segments. The new segments delivered the following KPI uplifts in comparison:

●     A decrease of 20-30% in cost per visit (CPV)

●     A 15-20% decrease in cost per action/online purchase (CPA)

●     An average increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) of 10%

Next, a further step to optimize costs through additional targeting was made through the expansion of willhaben’s data to include sociodemographic data. By focusing on IKEA's defined core online target groups, the costs for CPV or CPA were reduced by an average of 10% across all segments, with the ROAS almost doubling for certain segments.

The results of this collaboration were extremely privacy-preserving for IKEA, willhaben, and their respective customers and users. This is because the only output received by the collaborators was a dashboard with information about the affinity of the tested segments.

The data clean room approach using Decentriq’s audience insights has gained a solid foothold in all involved parties’ performance campaign strategies. Thanks to Decentriq, they can now continue to further improve performance by refining segments and optimizing product offerings.