MiQ Uses AWS in Combination with Amazon Marketing Cloud to Drive Performance of Advertising Campaigns and Lead the Future of Data-Driven Marketing

A programmatic media partner to brands and agencies, MiQ wanted to improve the performance of its customers’ digital-marketing campaigns running on Amazon Ads. The company needed a way to analyze campaign reporting from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a cloud-based data clean room solution from Amazon Ads, at scale for its customers. MiQ turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a query engine that could unearth aggregated insights from AMC about audience and campaign performance. The solution helped MiQ customers make more informed decisions about their cross-channel marketing investments. The user-level conversion data within AMC helped MiQ deliver visibility to its customers on which specific Amazon audience groups have higher conversion tendencies than others and helped reduce wastage of ad spends. More important, because privacy is fundamental to AMC, MiQ’s solution can lay the groundwork for the future of data-driven advertising with Amazon Ads by using user-level data to emphasize privacy.

Founded in 2010 in London, MiQ is a multinational programmatic media partner with offices across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific Region. One of its advanced media solutions for advertisers and agencies, MiQ Performance, uses consumer signals to improve the conversion rates of advertising campaigns. For example, MiQ uses predictive analytics capabilities to create audience segments of users likely to make a product purchase after viewing an ad. Its software then configures campaigns that are running on partner services to match advertising opportunities with these audience segments, leading to increased ad clicks and product purchases.

MiQ used AWS to build data pipelines that bring in ad event and reporting data for campaigns running across multiple ad solutions and then used the information in an analytics environment to develop a holistic picture of campaign performance and measurement. Running at scale, MiQ data pipelines onboard more than 10 TB of data daily, pushing it to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. “We amalgamate data from different sources, which empowers us to make intelligent decisions on behalf of the advertiser,” says Abhishek Chakraborty, MiQ’s senior product manager. “We use AWS to drive our data environment, and a data clean room solution is the next evolution of this data environment in an increasingly privacy-centric world.”

The gigabytes of data collected in Amazon S3 buckets connect to AWS analytics services that MiQ uses to process data and generate insights for making decisions in campaign management. For example, MiQ uses Amazon EMR, a cloud big data solution for running large-scale distributed data processing jobs, interactive SQL queries, and machine learning applications using open-source analytics frameworks. MiQ also uses Databricks on AWS, a unified data analytics solution for data engineering, machine learning, and collaborative data science. Its entire infrastructure is powered by compute instances from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which delivers secure, reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective compute infrastructure. MiQ primarily uses Amazon EC2 R5 Instances, which are well suited for memory-intensive applications, such as high-performance databases and real-time big data analytics.

After a campaign runs, MiQ uses its data pipelines to run advanced statistical algorithms that provide measurement and attribution solutions that reveal the primary advertising partners responsible for driving purchases. This information is crucial for advertisers, who use it to make better decisions on ad spending across channels and partners. “Using our data analytics solutions on AWS, we create improved visibility for the advertiser,” says Chakraborty. “They can make better planning decisions on which channels to invest in, know which channels worked perfectly fine, and know which channels underperform. With growing requirements for control around user-level data privacy, offering this much-sought-after transparency becomes a challenge, and Amazon Marketing Cloud is a perfect solution for it.”

MiQ customers use its solution to orchestrate and optimize campaigns running on Amazon Ads, with a goal of promoting products for sale on Amazon.com. To measure the performance of these campaigns, MiQ decided to build a data pipeline that queried AMC, which helps advertisers create aggregated reporting from cross-channel Amazon Ads campaigns in a data clean room environment with strict safeguards around data privacy and security, such as pseudonymization.

Using this infrastructure solution, MiQ data scientists can then apply complex machine learning algorithms that recommend custom-automated, near-real-time campaign strategies for clients and generate analytical insights. For example, using reporting from its AMC queries, MiQ can identify users that have a high propensity to convert to customers. As a result, MiQ can help its clients increase usage of high-performing segments and reduce wasteful spending by removing underperforming audience segments. “With the help of data, we can tell the marketer confidently that this is the set of users you should target, this is how you can minimize your spending, and this is how you can spend your marketing budget in a more cost-effective way,” says Chakraborty. “We can suggest that they reach out to a set of users that the data shows high potential to convert, which is what we call ‘incremental audience as an insight.’ And that was highly appreciated by the advertisers.” Using MiQ’s solutions on AWS, one brand’s prospecting campaign improved potential incremental reach by 13 percent and potential incremental converters by 16 percent.

Using AMC and Amazon Ads APIs, MiQ can find product-level insights for selling items on Amazon.com. For example, an advertising campaign might draw a user to Amazon.com, where the consumer ultimately purchases a different product than was featured in the original advertisement. Using its query engine to gather campaign reporting from AMC, MiQ can review aggregate reports of product views cross-referenced with ad impression data guide clients in product inventory management and adjust products featured in advertising campaigns.

MiQ is working to develop additional packaged solutions that connect aggregated reporting available within AMC to dashboards running on Amazon QuickSight, which makes it simple for everyone within an organization to understand data by asking questions in natural language, exploring through interactive dashboards, or automatically looking for patterns and outliers powered by machine learning. “Using our capabilities on AMC, we can garner some interesting insights for the advertiser spending on Amazon Ads in future-facing ways of data-driven marketing,” says Chakraborty. “We can deliver significant value to the advertiser already using AMC and connected AWS infrastructure, and we are in the process of doing even more.”