Effective marketing campaigns with limited access to user data

Considering law changes in the personal data market and increasingly protected privacy, online publishers face new challenges. Access restrictions to internet users' data make it harder to identify the ads recipients based on their behavioural characteristics. Read about the WARRP platform – a solution created to face these challenges.

Business-user-law

The GDPR has already introduced the first changes, next, the ePrivacy, called GDPR-2, has been prepared for several years. It's the regulation of the European Parliament on the respect for private life and the protection of personal data.

ePrivacy's goal is to ensure an even higher level of privacy and security of data from electronic communications, the so-called end devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets).

Internet users are increasingly aware of the security and value of their data

One of the goals of ePrivacy is to increase the level of transparency towards cookies and protect metadata – such as information about the user's location or visits to websites. Therefore, the new regulations may allow the use of cookies as long as they do not interfere too much with users’ privacy, for example, they are not marketing cookies.

Regardless of these regulations, there are many indications that cookies will soon disappear anyway. Tech giant Google has already declared its willingness to resign from them. Instead of cookies, the behaviour of Internet users is to be monitored directly by their servers. This tracking will be less precise but safer for users' privacy.

Marketing activities in e-Privacy 

The ePrivacy Regulation will have further implications for ISPs (email, messaging, etc.) and active marketing.

According to the adopted assumption, the term direct marketing will be referring to any form of advertising in which a natural or legal person sends materials for direct marketing purposes, directing them directly to one or more identified end-users or identifiable end-users using electronic communications services. 

ePrivacy project distinguishes two types of communication:

• B2C communication – addressed to individual users,
• B2B communication – where the recipients are companies.

In the case of B2C communication, the sender of the message will need to have explicit consent from the recipient to send the advertisements to them. As for the B2B communication, the EU legislator has left the method of protection to the Member States, noticing, that they must ensure a certain level of protection against unsolicited messages.

Business versus users – conflict of interest 

Why does the ePrivacy process take so long? First, there is a classic conflict of both values and interests between businesses and Internet users.

The companies want to know as much as possible about users, and the users want to have maximum anonymity. It is mainly about cookies tracking Internet users. The problem with cookies is that they escape the GDPR regulations. At the same time, they are essential information, like, as we know, personal data. 

Effective advertising campaigns despite limited access to data? 

Currently, remarketing tools do not fully use the e-commerce entities’ own data to create effective campaigns. Their focus mainly on data from external websites. That means that they loose big amount of data about customer behaviour gathered on the online stores' websites.

What's more, in face of mentioned data access limitations, the decreasing amount of user data should be compensated by a more effective analysis of the context of showing the advertisement and increasing the amount of information about the product. It is possible through the use of advanced methods of processing other data. Publisher data and tools based on contextual targeting will gain value. And above all, first-party data of e-commerce entities. 

WARRP technology is the answer to these challenges. It's the first and only platform of its kind that compensates for both current and future limitations in access to user data. It meets the needs of online publishers who provide advertisers with space on their websites and serves the entire online advertising industry.

Innovative WARRP technology – a remedy for data access limitations 

The aim of the project is to create an environment, methods and tools for marketing and remarketing campaigns. The developed technology is based on deep learning and the use of cloud infrastructure.

Thanks to the used technologies, as part of creating a bidding offer, WARRP automates and optimises the process of preparing product recommendations and user valuation.

The WARRP project assumes:

1. creating an environment for highly personalised marketing campaigns with little data about users and maintaining their privacy;
2. paving the way for publishers to cooperate directly with advertisers by eliminating intermediaries and, as a result, achieving higher revenues from the advertising space provided;
3. enabling e-commerce entities to lower the costs related to the purchase of space.

Tools used in the WARRP platform 

To compensate for limited access to user data, the solution uses tools such as a recommendation system and a user pricing engine. The module will support better matching of the displayed advertisement to a given user for acquiring and enriching product data.

To extend product information we used models for:

• image analysis (Visual Analysis Al Model) – enables the extension of product information with additional features resulting from the image, thanks to the “image embedding” technique; 
• text analysis (Text Analysis Al Model), which helps in the selection of relevant content from articles, comments and reviews about a given product on the Internet. 

What's more, in WARRP platform, we use deep neural networks models that enable effective prediction of user behaviour.

To predict user behaviour we used models for estimating:

• click-through rate – assesses the probability with which a given user will click on the displayed ad;
• conversion – enables compelling valuation of the user; 
• price offered by other shops – optimising the price of an advertising space, both for the advertiser and the publisher. 

Additional functionalities of the WARRP platform include the following: 

1. including in the remarketing processes of products and users previously excluded due to the problem of “rarity”; 
2. anticipating preferences for new users or new products; 
3. dynamic ad creation with the option of changing the ad template.

WARRP platform implementation

Publisher, do you want to increase the effectiveness of ads displayed on your website and reduce the costs for you and your e-commerce sellers? Then, the WARRP platform is for you and your company.

Our team can create an environment for highly personalised marketing campaigns with limited data access and complete user privacy.

Publishers using our platform can guarantee the advertisers a 1–1.5% increase in ads efficiency and a 10% lower costs comparing to solution from global companies.

Do you want to implement the WARRP platform? Contact us!

In summary

The development of the WARRP platform was a part of the project named “Environment and tools for preparing product recommendations and optimising marketing and remarketing campaigns”. We undertook the project as part of the Smart Growth European Funds program 2014–2020.