An award-winning AdTech company, Adapex, needed to change its approach to capturing and processing event data due to the impending “cookie apocalypse.” The company focused on collecting high-quality first-party data from across its network to sync with identity management platforms for accurate identity matching, enrichment, and activation. This required not only a robust event pipeline to handle Adapex’s immense scale but also an advanced reporting layer to provide real-time insights into marketing funnel performance, ensuring that first-party data capture and synchronization were working as expected.
We implemented Datomni’s Snowplow CDI solution with a custom data model, integrated it with the identity management platform LiveRamp, and deployed an Omni Reporting instance running on Metabase for dashboards and metrics. This integration enables the client to understand which websites generate the most valuable first-party data across their network, providing complete control over the pipeline in a private cloud.
Client profile: high-growth, award-winning business
The client, an Inc 5000 company and one of America’s 2024 Fastest Growing Companies, excels in optimizing digital ad revenue for publishers. Using advanced technology and strategic partnerships, client maximizes ad revenue and streamlines monetization. Recognized for excellence in sell-side technology by AdMonsters, Digiday, and AdExchanger, the client demonstrates its commitment to innovation and leadership in ad tech.
The key challenges: third-party cookie apocalypse, analytics funnel reporting, full control over data and pipelines
There were a few very acute challenges we had to deal with in this project.
Loss of third-party cookies
The deprecation of third-party cookies by major browsers impacts advertising brands by reducing their ability to track users across multiple sites. This shift forces brands to rely more on first-party data collected directly from their platforms. However, tracking first-party data comes with challenges like validation, identity resolution, encryption, and more. Integrations with third-party identity management platforms, which have their own identity graphs, are often needed.
Changing privacy landscape and regulations
Compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA limits the applicability of third-party cookies, complicating data collection and user tracking for brands.
Limited ways of targeting and personalization due to market shifts
With third-party cookies, advertisers could build detailed user profiles based on activity across multiple websites and target ads effectively based on behaviors and interests. Without third-party cookies, this cross-site tracking becomes much harder, reducing the precision of ad targeting. Third-party cookies also provided data to tailor content across various sites, enhancing personalized user experiences. Without them, personalization suffers, leading to less relevant ads, lower click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and ROI for ad campaigns.
Industry challenges measuring attribution
Advertising companies rely on multi-touch attribution to model cross-channel user journeys and assign credit to various touchpoints. The loss of third-party cookies means losing visibility into many touchpoints, complicating the understanding of the full path to conversion. Attribution modeling is crucial for retargeting campaigns, which depend on tracking users who have interacted with ads but haven’t converted. Without third-party cookies, identifying and retargeting these users becomes more complex, requiring other methods like acquiring first-party identifiers at scale.
Need for full control over data infrastructure
The company required a robust data infrastructure to handle high event volumes related to first-party data acquisition. They preferred running everything in their private cloud infrastructure, maintaining full control over all data pipeline components. A robust and replicable event and identifier capture process, clearly defined team responsibilities, and efficient onboarding of new websites were essential.
Need for detailed first-party sync reporting
There was a need for visibility into the performance of individual publisher sites to generate conversions and capture first-party user data. The goal was to have a focused data dashboard covering the performance of the publisher network in capturing first-party IDs.
Building Snowplow CDI with Liveramp in the activation layer and a private Metabase instance for funnel reporting
Our solution resulted in deploying Snowplow CDI along with several additional components, including LiveRamp activation, data warehousing, and Metabase dashboards.
Event and first-party data capture and identity resolution with Liveramp
We designed scripts to capture first-party identifiers, encrypt them, and dispatch them to the Snowplow pipeline for proper ingestion. The Iglu registry was populated with custom schemas reflecting required event payload data points, including custom identifiers and customer hashes. These schemas were kept in sync with changing business requirements. All captured first-party identifiers were synced with LiveRamp, which uses its own identity graph to associate these identifiers and build secure user profiles. We standardized this setup for quick implementation across any website, depending on the types of forms used.
Respecting consent with data and event capture
We implemented event tracking for the entire lifecycle of capturing, validating, encrypting, and syncing first-party identifiers with identity providers. Each event had its own schema and was synced with Snowplow data. This tracking helped us identify bottlenecks in the capture process across the network. Data collection complied with consent management tools like GDPR and CCPA.
Linking first-party data with identity graph and Liveramp
The client used the new data to build detailed user profiles and audience segments for more effective targeting and personalization with first-party data. LiveRamp’s measurement and attribution tools tracked and analyzed campaign performance across channels, allowing for more accurate attribution models based on first-party data.
Better insights into the performance of the sites from the network in their ability to capture first-party IDs
By connecting the cleaned, processed, and validated Snowplow pipeline with Metabase via a PostgreSQL warehouse, we created aggregated reports on tens of millions of events each month. This helped identify websites with the highest potential for capturing first-party user identifiers and understand conversion bottlenecks across the publisher network. We also stored pseudonymous identifiers in the warehouse for future processing and designed a process for rolling out the solution to new websites, collaborating closely with the team for continuous communication.
Snowplow CDI for the partner’s win
This case study demonstrates that Snowplow CDI is particularly robust for high-traffic systems with well-defined analytics needs and predefined data schemas. Snowplow scales cost-effectively and can provide a high ROI on analytics when used properly, making it ideal for businesses with stringent data requirements.
Photo attribution
As usual, the featured image of the article is a photograph that corresponds with the article’s topic. This time, the shoutout goes Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash.
