For its SMB campaign, Indeed entered its first-party data into Disney’s clean room tech to create look-a-like audiences across Hulu users.
In our other clean room experiments, the data transfers, audience set up, and the mechanics of getting it to work were not as smooth.
Joseph Zucker, senior manager, marketing analytics, Indeed
Meanwhile, for the job seeker campaign, Indeed used Disney’s first-party data of Hulu users and split them into test and control groups. The test group was exposed to an Indeed ad on Hulu, while the control group wasn’t. After the campaign, Indeed integrated its job seeker conversion data into the clean room and matched it against the predefined audience at the user level.
In both cases, Indeed looked at the conversion rate among users who saw the ads on Hulu and compared it to those who visited the site without seeing the ad and calculated the audience lift.
“Because the two groups were identical with the exception of receiving an Indeed ad, we are confident the Indeed ad caused the difference,” said Zucker.
Meanwhile, the conversions were correlated with the generated revenue to calculate ROI from each campaign.
“And those were quite successful from Indeed’s perspective,” said Isaac Dinner, director of econometric modeling, marketing analytics, Indeed.
Further, an unintended outcome of the campaign was its spill-over impact, meaning that the job seeker campaign attracted a certain number of employers to the platform, while the SMB-focused campaign also drew in a portion of job seekers to Indeed.
“We observed a consistent occurrence of both,” noted Dinner.
Simultaneously, the data clean room lets Indeed deploy user-level data targeting, offering more refined demographics compared to geo-level targeting.
“We achieved this at a fraction of the cost [compared to geo-targeting] and got much cleaner and more precise results,” Dinner said.
Expanding tests to ESPN
While the industry is solving for interoperability capabilities within clean room technology, Indeed primarily encountered operational hurdles related to aligning and coordinating among numerous teams prior to the campaign launch.
The key teams included Indeed’s analytics team, media partners responsible for overseeing creative outputs for both campaigns, its agency partner EssenceMediaCom, Disney’s data science team, as well as teams from Snowflake and Habu to set up the clean room.
“All of those were critical for the success of the project,” said Zucker.