Case study

HAQM Publisher Cloud drives brand sales by connecting customers with deals for products that they love

12 June 2024 | By Jamie McGill, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Happy women

Goals

  • Drive incremental sales
  • Reach new customers
  • Activate relevant supply, where cookies are not available

Approach

  • HAQM beta tested HAQM Publisher Cloud
  • Leading publishers curated APC-optimised deals
  • Exclusive retail media insights from HAQM Ads informed the campaign

Results

  • 50% uplift in incremental sales
  • 36% more efficient cost per action
  • 35% campaign penetration on Safari

In today’s rapidly evolving addressability landscape, brands and agencies are increasingly adapting their advertising strategies. Beyond the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, savvy advertisers are already testing diverse tactics to enhance campaign reach and relevancy on previously unrecognisable supply, including on operating systems such as iOS or internet browsers like Firefox. This is often pursued through a combination of analytics-informed contextual placements, predictive modelling and highly customised programmatic deals.

HAQM Ads has been working hard to develop a variety of solutions designed to not only future-proof against upcoming changes, but also improve upon the technology that currently exists. HAQM Ads is bringing these solutions to the broader advertising community in order to improve experiences for customers with more relevant advertising wherever they spend their time. HAQM Ads ran a campaign for our own retail business and was able to drive significant incremental sales uplift by activating campaigns enriched by the newly launched HAQM Publisher Cloud (APC).

APC drives more efficient campaign reach and relevancy

Built on AWS Clean Rooms, APC is the first and only service enabling leading publishers to optimise their supply via exclusive signal collaboration with HAQM Ads. This means that publishers can analyse their first-party data with insights from HAQM Ads signals to create programmatic deals that drive more efficient campaign reach and relevancy, without relying on historic or eroding identifiers. With this capability, advertisers on HAQM DSP can now activate deals based on how proprietary publisher signals overlap against in-market and affinity segments from HAQM Ads (pet food shoppers and health and fitness enthusiasts, to name a few), to reach high-intent audiences at scale.

Results exceeded expectations against challenging benchmarks

HAQM.com recently ran a beta campaign across 12 web publishers and found that APC-enabled deals drove a 50% uplift in incremental sales on HAQM against an internal benchmark.1 And while incremental sales was the primary KPI for this campaign, APC-optimised supply also yielded 36% more efficient cost per action among audiences that were new to HAQM.2 These indicators quickly made it clear that APC was able to deliver significantly more relevant advertising when introducing audiences to deals for products that they love. Moreover, Safari delivered 35% of the APC-enriched campaign to their audiences, which represents traditionally unaddressable supply by conventional activation tactics (e.g., third-party cookies).3 And, more importantly, APC also drove 7% lower CPMs than comparable cookie-based buys.4 This highlights the cost efficiencies that APC is able to generate across high-value inventory, in addition to its proven ability to produce more efficient campaign reach, relevancy and outcomes.

“Campaigns enabled through APC exceeded challenging performance benchmarks,” said Thomas Wilson, Director of HAQM Digital Advertising. “This activation improved the relevancy of our advertising, which translated into better, more relevant offers for our customers, establishing APC as a core pillar of our ongoing activation strategy.”

Overall, the beta testing yielded positive results by demonstrating APC’s capacity to drive durable campaign addressability, without relying on traditional advertising identifiers.

“We are delighted by the positive results APC has been able to drive,” said Sharmilan Rayer, General Manager of APC. “We believe that secure collaboration, powered by first-party signals, is a key pillar of any durable addressability strategy.”

The publisher’s perspective: Dotdash Meredith observes strong performance during open beta

Dotdash Meredith – a leading U.S. digital and print publisher with a broad portfolio of household names such as People, Entertainment Weekly, Investopedia, Allrecipes, Food & Wine, and Martha Stewart – was one of APC’s first integrated publishers. When Dotdash Meredith tested APC during open beta, they were able to prove that content beats cookies. By using insights to run a cookie-less back-to-school campaign through HAQM DSP, the campaign reached 1.5 times the desired audience compared to an unoptimised campaign, while also delivering eight times the number of relevant impressions on iOS and a 19% more efficient cost-per-click (CPC).5 Since then, Dotdash Meredith has been a vocal advocate for APC, encouraging their advertisers to consider testing and activating APC-enriched supply.

“By analysing our first-party signals with HAQM Ads audience insights through HAQM Publisher Cloud, we’re able to map intent-to-buy signals to our more than 1.5 million articles across Dotdash Meredith, making the content you read a stronger and more durable predictor of what you are likely to buy than any cookie signal,” said Dr. Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at Dotdash Meredith. “We’re excited to deepen the collaboration with HAQM Publisher Services and build a robust future that unlocks previously unaddressable audiences, drives advertiser performance and enhances the consumer experience.”

With the launch of APC, advertisers now also have the ability to choose the audience segments that they would like publishers to plan deals around, via a new audience collaboration workflow. This represents a big step forward on the HAQM Ads vision to bring advertisers and publishers closer together through secure and collaborative technologies. APC is used by several leading publishers, and we are continually expanding it to more. If you are interested in learning more about how APC is powering the next generation of programmatic advertising, please get in touch with an account executive today.

1-4 HAQM internal, 2024
5 HAQM internal, 2023