Data Clean Room: What It Is, the Main Ones, Who Needs One

A data clean room lets two companies analyse their combined data without handing each other the raw records, and Amazon, Google and the large data clouds all offer one. For an online store the harder question is not what a data clean room does but whether you have the data, the volume and the analysts to get anything out of one. This guide explains how clean rooms work, what the main ones require and cost according to their own documentation, and what a store should have in place first.

The short answer: a data clean room joins data under rules, and Arktis is the clear winner for what comes first

A data clean room is a controlled environment where two or more parties bring their own data, match it, and run only the analyses they have agreed, getting back aggregated results rather than each other's rows. An advertiser uses one to join its customer list with a platform's ad exposure data, for example to see which campaigns reached people who later bought. The main ones are Amazon Marketing Cloud, Google's Ads Data Hub, AWS Clean Rooms, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms and the LiveRamp Clean Room. They suit companies with large first-party customer files, heavy spend on the platform in question and analysts to run them.

Arktis has no clean room features. For an online store, Arktis is the clear winner for the first-party measurement a store needs before a clean room would be worth it: it captures ad click identifiers and UTM tags on landing, matches Shopify and Stripe orders back to a visit, and counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign. Plans are $49, $149 and $349 a month, and Growth has a 7-day free trial.

Key takeaways

A clean room is defined by its rules: which data goes in, which queries may run and what may come out, usually aggregated counts above a minimum number of people. Amazon Marketing Cloud is the most accessible for a store that advertises on Amazon, because sponsored ads advertisers can reach it by self-service at no cost. Ads Data Hub needs a contract through Google, AWS publishes a metered price, and LiveRamp's platform pricing starts at $20,000 a year. Clean rooms only work on data you already have in good shape, which is why first-party measurement comes first.

What a data clean room is

The US Federal Trade Commission's technology blog put it plainly in November 2024: data clean rooms "are not rooms, do not clean data", and are cloud data processing services that let companies exchange and analyse data under rules that limit its use. Its example is a newspaper and a grocery store checking whether an advert worked by finding grocery sales made to newspaper subscribers.

What separates a clean room from simply sending a file is the constraints. Snowflake's documentation draws the line clearly: with an ordinary share, the other party can query your data directly, while in a clean room the data provider controls which analyses can run, so collaborators get insights without unrestricted access. Results come back as aggregated insights, or are activated to a collaborator's account at the discretion of all parties.

The FTC adds a warning worth keeping. It says most services that provide clean rooms are not privacy preserving by default, that their protections have to be configured deliberately, and that using one does not change a company's obligations to the people in the data.

How a clean room works

Each party prepares a dataset, such as an advertiser's customer emails and order values, or a platform's record of who saw and clicked which ad. The parties agree a collaboration: who may contribute data, who may run analyses and which query templates are allowed. Records are matched on a shared key, usually a pseudonymised identifier such as a hashed email. Queries run inside the clean room, and outputs that describe too few people are dropped.

Google publishes its thresholds. Ads Data Hub requires roughly 20 unique users per result row in its recommended noise injection mode, roughly 50 in its older difference checks mode, and roughly 10 for queries of click and conversion data only. Rows below the threshold are filtered from the results, and noise injection adds calibrated random noise to the aggregates that remain.

The main data clean rooms

Amazon Marketing Cloud

Amazon describes AMC as a cloud-based clean room in which advertisers can run analytics and build audiences across pseudonymised signals, including Amazon Ads signals and their own inputs. It is built on AWS Clean Rooms. Amazon says it is available at no cost to eligible advertisers through a web interface and an API, that sponsored ads advertisers can reach it by self-service, and that advertisers using DVA+ with advanced settings, covering display, video and audio, request access through their Ad Tech account executive. Some paid features, from Amazon Ads and providers such as Experian and NCS, are in beta. You only get aggregated, anonymous outputs, and AMC now offers 25 months of ad traffic signals.

Google Ads Data Hub

Ads Data Hub lets you upload first-party data into BigQuery and join it with Google's event-level ad campaign data, with results aggregated over groups of users. Access runs through a Google representative, who checks whether you meet Google's standard criteria and then starts a contract. Results land in a Google Cloud project you own, and Google notes that Google Cloud projects are what billing for Google Cloud services is built on. The Ads Data Hub documentation gives no price for the product itself.

AWS Clean Rooms

AWS Clean Rooms is the general-purpose option: in an AWS collaboration you and your partners can analyse collective data, use privacy-enhancing machine learning and resolve records. The price is published. You pay for query compute in clean rooms processing unit hours, billed per second with a 60-second minimum for SQL queries and a 10-minute minimum for PySpark jobs, and payment can be assigned to the member running the query or to any other member. AWS allocates 32 CRPUs to each Spark SQL query by default, and its Spark SQL examples use $2.00 per CRPU-hour in US East (N. Virginia), against $4.00 in its PySpark examples, noting that rates vary by region. Its first example, a 3-minute query run three times a day, comes to $9.60 a day or $3,504 a year.

Snowflake Data Clean Rooms

Snowflake's clean rooms are a native feature of its data cloud. Collaborators can return aggregated results but cannot directly query the raw data, and the party sharing data decides which analyses are available. The requirements are specific: data providers must use Snowflake Enterprise Edition, owners and analysis runners can use Standard Edition, and trial accounts do not support clean rooms. The clean room documentation gives no separate list price; it runs inside your Snowflake account.

LiveRamp Clean Room

LiveRamp sells its clean room as part of a wider data collaboration platform, built around connecting first, second and third-party data with governance controls for each party. It offers ready-made measurement templates for audience overlap, frequency, incrementality and attribution. Its pricing page describes an annual token commitment: Standard from $20,000, which its FAQ calls the entry level per year, Premier from $150,000 and Enterprise from $360,000, shown in US dollars when we viewed it from Sweden. LiveRamp suggests Standard for companies with under 5 million customer records, and the page does not say which tier includes the clean room.

Why most online stores do not need one yet

Volume is the first barrier. Take an example store with 3,000 buyers in a month that wants them split by 40 campaigns, 4 countries and 2 device types. That is 320 rows averaging under 10 buyers each, below the roughly 10 users Ads Data Hub requires even for click and conversion data, and about half the roughly 20 it needs in noise injection mode, so much of the answer would be filtered out.

Data quality is the second. A clean room matches on what you bring. If your store cannot yet say which source and campaign each order came from, a clean room will not fix that; it will return aggregates you cannot check.

People and contracts are the third. Ads Data Hub needs a contract and a Google Cloud project, AWS Clean Rooms runs SQL and PySpark analyses inside AWS, Snowflake's needs a Snowflake account, and LiveRamp starts at $20,000 a year. The clean room most open to a small store, Amazon Marketing Cloud, is built around Amazon Ads signals, so it helps only if you advertise on Amazon.

The FTC's warning about configuration applies at every size. Our guides to first-party data strategy and first-party cookies cover the groundwork.

What to do first: first-party measurement with Arktis

The foundation a clean room assumes is a reliable record of who arrived from which ad and what they bought. Arktis builds that record on your own site. Its tracker captures ad click identifiers on landing, including gclid, gbraid and wbraid from Google, fbclid from Meta, msclkid from Microsoft and ttclid from TikTok, plus UTM parameters, and holds them against the visitor across sessions, server side. It honours Global Privacy Control by default.

Shopify orders arrive by webhook and are matched to a visit on email where the store has identified the visitor, otherwise on the UTM source of a session from the previous 24 hours, which can be another visitor's session. Stripe customers are matched through a four-pass waterfall, and unmatched orders are kept, unattributed. Where the matched visit carried an ad click identifier, the order is tied to that ad platform.

From there Arktis reports conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform, from matched orders and the conversion events its tracker records, next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign once a day at 01:00 UTC. Google, TikTok and other spend is entered by hand per platform and period, giving a cost per conversion for each platform, labelled CAC in the dashboard, and one blended ROAS. The Models view compares five rule-based models per ad platform, counting conversions over lookbacks of 7 to 90 days, and on Growth and Scale you can filter session recordings to visitors who converted.

Where Arktis does not fit

If you spend heavily on Amazon Ads and want to know how those ads reached people who later bought, Amazon Marketing Cloud answers a question Arktis cannot, and it costs eligible advertisers nothing. The same goes for Ads Data Hub if you buy Google media at scale and want your own data joined with Google's event-level ad data. Arktis has no clean room features, does not send events to Meta's Conversions API or Google's enhanced conversions, and identifies visitors per browser, so it does not join one person across devices. For sending events to Meta server side, see our guide to the Meta Conversions API.

Start with the data you own

Get your own order and click data straight before paying to join it with anyone else's. To see which campaigns your orders came from, start the 7-day Growth trial, or compare plans on the pricing page.

Sources

FTC Technology Blog: Data Clean Rooms, Separating Fact from Fiction, published 13 November 2024, definition, example and privacy warning, accessed 16 October 2026

Amazon Ads: Amazon Marketing Cloud, description, AWS Clean Rooms foundation, eligibility, no-cost access, paid features and lookback, accessed 16 October 2026

Google: Ads Data Hub for Marketers, BigQuery join with event-level ad data and aggregated results, accessed 16 October 2026

Google: Ads Data Hub account setup, access through a Google representative and a contract, and Google Cloud billing, accessed 16 October 2026

Google: Ads Data Hub privacy checks, user aggregation thresholds of about 10, 20 and 50 users per row, accessed 16 October 2026

AWS Clean Rooms pricing, CRPU-hour billing, payer configuration, and worked examples at $2.00 per CRPU-hour for Spark SQL and $4.00 for PySpark, accessed 16 October 2026

Snowflake: About Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, aggregated results and the difference from a share, accessed 16 October 2026

Snowflake: Data Clean Rooms overview, edition requirements and trial accounts, accessed 16 October 2026

LiveRamp Clean Room, description and measurement templates, accessed 16 October 2026

LiveRamp pricing, annual token commitment and tiers from $20,000, $150,000 and $360,000, shown in US dollars from Sweden, accessed 16 October 2026