Data is the driving force behind Proxima's predictive intelligence platform. Our Shopper Universe is one of the largest datasets in eCommerce — with first-party data from over 70 million online shoppers and over $17 billion in purchases across thousands of Shopify stores. Having this magnitude of data at our disposal is an undeniable competitive advantage for brands looking to enrich their own data and leverage it to improve targeting accuracy on ad platforms. 

However, we recognize that this dataset raises questions about privacy, security, and compliance. Working with data at this scale can be a bit intimidating, so in this product education guide, we’ll shed light on Proxima's data privacy philosophy and the inner workings of our Shopper Universe. 

Proxima's data privacy philosophy

Your business is built on trust. Ours is too. The only thing more critical than protecting your organization’s information is protecting your customers’ data. 

That's why we’re obsessed with ensuring compliance with all rules and regulations for our platform and Shopper Universe. We’ve been data-driven from day one, and data privacy and security aren’t just a checkbox for us. They are core values that drive everything we do.

We promise to always encrypt your data, never share or sell it, and only use it to help Meta better understand your brand and audience.

Privacy & compliance by default

Our dataset contains millions of anonymized shopper personas that we mine to create boosted seed audiences. But the rawest data we collect is name and email — which we never share and use solely to make one-way matches into the Shopper Universe based on behavioral data points.

And, to hold ourselves as accountable as possible, we work with external partners to independently audit our security architecture and controls. We engage regularly with a penetration testing firm to provide independent assurance that we stay updated with security best practices.

As soon as any data enters our Shopper Universe, it gets hashed and put under lock and key. Nobody, not even our customers, ever gets access to the data. Once the data is anonymized, we send it straight to Meta.

Our system encrypts data in transit and at rest.

Customer information is safe and sound

Keeping data anonymous allows our model to build audiences from customer behaviors rather than demographics. We wouldn’t make a seed audience out of a group of, say, 25- to 34-year-olds living in NYC making >$100k. Instead, our algorithm identifies pools of shoppers with similar purchasing behaviors to your core customers.

Premising our predictive model on shopping behaviors rather than demographics, in turn, allows you to get your ads in front of in-market buyers who are most likely to purchase from your brand (and show strong intent of being high-LTV repeat customers). Feeding massive amounts of high-fidelity data into Meta nudges the algorithm in the right direction – enabling you to more precisely target high-intent audiences without compromising user information.

Proxima is a Shopify-certified app. The terms of our Shopify partnership require that we remain compliant with all GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) rules and regulations, including the right to be forgotten (or right to erasure). We provide a programmatic integration to remove all personally identifiable information.

In fact, all our natively built integrations use official APIs and conform to the terms of service of third-party providers. We never collect first-party or zero-party data without the user’s consent and support single sign-on and strict role-based internal access control. We also limit internal access to tools and resources using time-based access.

We only collect data in the U.S.

To remain rigorously GDPR compliant, we block all EU data from entering our Shopper Universe. Why? We’re hyperfocused on the U.S. market right now since that’s where our brands do the majority of business.

However, if brands do want to target European users, they’re welcome to use Proxima’s behavioral model as a baseline and rely on Meta for the actual targeting element — all while remaining confident that they’re still compliant.

How Proxima uses your customer data within its predictive intelligence platform

Proxima never absorbs your customers’ data. Instead, we use it to help you build better audiences.

When we onboard a new brand to our network, our team builds anonymous customer profiles from an aggregate of shopping behaviors. We base each profile on behaviors such as:

• Order and return history
• Type of products purchased
• Average order value (AOV)
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)

These elements come together to help Proxima create a “proxy” of customers for you to target. Whether a customer is especially loyal to a particular brand, more inclined to buy across brands, or perpetually making returns, their shopping behaviors enrich our understanding of your brand and customers.

Put simply, we never share your data with other businesses or allow brands to target seed audiences directly. 

More data = stronger signal. The compounding volume of aggregated commerce data is what makes Proxima’s dataset such a powerful weapon for brands. But we get that you might want to keep your own brand’s data private. No worries. We offer data ringfencing and a “no train” policy, which means no one else benefits from your proprietary data. You get a bespoke model trained for you without having to share your data with the network.

Why Proxima is the leader in data privacy and performance 

Of the audience targeting solutions available, Proxima distinguishes itself with a rich data pool of more than 70 million anonymized shoppers and over $17 billion in actual purchases across thousands of Shopify stores. 

Anonymous data is at the heart of our platform

Where competitors like Black Crow AI and Shopify Audiences derive all their insights from site traffic and product-specific signals, we don’t use that information to (re)target shoppers directly. We never put customers at risk of having their confidential information leaked because we’re only interested in using their anonymized behavioral data to prompt Meta to reach net-new audiences.

Other solutions simply can’t match our scalability

Platforms based solely on site traffic data just aren’t scalable — and require constant monitoring. If you’re only targeting people who visit your site or who window shop without making a purchase, you’ll be sinking a lot of time into a very limited audience pool. In fact, retargeting typically only makes up around 10% to 20% of a brand’s total ad spend. And, when a solution requires that much maintenance without reaping commensurate returns, it’s not worth a marketer’s time.

At Proxima, we not only go well beyond your own site’s data, but we also push updates to your underlying seed audiences on a weekly basis. So, when you’re running a campaign loaded up with lookalikes from Proxima, we’ll refresh those audiences on the fly, giving you the most up-to-date shopper data to continuously inform your targeting.

As a result, our brand partners have been able to scale their ad spend at unprecedented levels of efficiency. It’s so effective that our audiences command 80%+ of total Meta spend for many of our customers.

"Using Proxima as the cornerstone of our Meta ads strategy has been a complete game changer. Knowing their AI Audiences consistently rank in the upper quartile of our spending allows me to rest easy at night." — Randall Stainton, President of Finn

Leading eCommerce brands trust Proxima with their paid media budget

In today's marketing landscape, it's not uncommon for brands to pour their entire budget into Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) and broad targeting while investing heavily in creative testing to inform targeting. But there are more fruitful paths to scaling profitably on Meta — like audience testing. Imagine having a secret weapon, a treasure trove of data, to guide your ad targeting and drive predictable efficiencies on the platform. 

Our DTC partners are already making this dream a reality. Consider our partnership with the renowned health and beauty brand Obvi. Obvi’s CMO wanted to scale its $500K monthly ad spend but kept hitting a performance ceiling. The brand struggled to find incrementality with ASC and broad targeting alone — until they discovered Proxima. 

Our vast Shopper Universe and high-intent AI Audiences were just the ticket. Since onboarding, Obvi has scaled its ad spend +2.3x, and sales have soared.

"Going Broad on Meta was like throwing a fishing line into a massive ocean of customers and hoping for a bite. Proxima takes you right to where the fish are." — Ash Melwani, Co-Founder and CMO of Obvi

Why Proxima is the best way to reduce concentration risk and diversify your ad spend 

Proxima’s AI Audiences are a fail-safe way to diversify your Meta spend. When you place all your trust in a single strategy, you expose yourself to concentration risk. You become vulnerable to all kinds of external factors that could impact your performance: algorithm changes, cost surges, policy updates, platform disruptions, and more.

If Meta makes up the majority of your brand’s ad budget, you shouldn’t leave performance up to chance. You must reclaim control over targeting to ensure your ads are getting in front of the right people as efficiently as possible.

When ASC and broad fall short, Proxima’s resilient data intelligence tool fills in the gaps.

Scale through audiences, not just creative

We get it. Creative is king. But, constant creative iteration can come at a significant cost and time investment. Proxima offers brands another way to target and scale: through audiences. 

The best marketers are thinking about audience testing the same way they think about creative testing. We all know Meta is unpredictable, but audiences can help you take back control of your targeting, broaden your reach (in a more efficient way), increase your creative hit rate, and reduce wasted spend. 

While Proxima offers an option for audiences to automatically refresh weekly, some of our brands’ original audiences are still going strong two years in — with one even hitting a record $3.5 million in profitable spend.

And you don’t have to worry about hitting a ceiling because our best-in-class media ops and data science teams live for experimentation. If you want to test new models or build bespoke audiences, we’re here to help. We’re happy to re-run models or construct new models until you see the results you want. 

Access in-depth performance insights

In addition to enabling audience refreshes, our platform provides constant visibility into all the most recent data you need to boost your performance. Meta’s targeting options are a black box, but at Proxima, we’re pulling back the curtain to explain how every data point justifies every use case.

If you’re wondering how your customers are shopping at other stores or which influencers they’re engaging with, we can show you. If you’re wondering what your peers’ media mix or top-performing creatives look like, we can show you that too. You can use these insights to shape your marketing strategies and improve your retention and customer LTV.

We also provide network-powered industry benchmarks so that you can see how your paid media performance stacks up to your competitors’ performance.

With Proxima’s data at your disposal, you’ll never be left in the dark.

Proxima is your secret weapon for unlocking efficient scale on Meta

If you’re looking to efficiently scale your paid media spend without compromising customer privacy, Proxima is the perfect fit for you. 

Are you ready to crush your revenue goals with data-driven marketing strategies?

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