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Exclusion targeting

Exclusion targeting removes an advertiser's own existing customers from a campaign, so ad spend focuses on acquiring net-new customers rather than showing ads to people who already convert. In a data clean room, an advertiser's customer list is matched against a publisher's audience, and only the non-matching remainder is used for activation. The publisher never receives the advertiser's customer list, and the advertiser never sees the publisher's underlying audience data.

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How it works

The advertiser uploads its customer list into the clean room, and the publisher supplies its audience data, with neither list leaving its original environment. The clean room identifies the overlap between the two datasets and removes it, leaving only the publisher audience that wasn’t matched. In Decentriq, exclusion targeting is set up with rule-based audiences: the advertiser defines rules, such as excluding existing customers, and can layer additional rules, such as demographic or behavioral criteria, before activation. Learn more about audience exclusion as part of a first-party data activation strategy.

See it in action: Remarketing in a Decentriq data clean room

Rule-based audiences on the Decentriq platform, showing how rule-based audiences combine exclusion rules with other targeting criteria across multiple data sources.

Frequently asked questions

How is exclusion targeting different from remarketing?

Remarketing re-engages an advertiser's existing customers. Exclusion targeting does the opposite, removing those same customers from a campaign so spend focuses on net-new prospects.

Does exclusion targeting work across multiple publishers at once?

Yes. An advertiser's customer list can be matched separately against each publisher's audience, so exclusions apply consistently even when a campaign runs across several partners.

How often does the exclusion list need to be updated?

As often as the advertiser's customer list changes. Since the match runs fresh each time the campaign refreshes, a newly acquired customer can be excluded from future flights without rebuilding the audience from scratch.

Who decides which customers get excluded?

The advertiser sets the exclusion rules, such as existing customers or recent purchasers, and the clean room applies it automatically during the match.

View Other Targeting use-cases

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Remarketing

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Talk to us about exclusion targeting