The Challenge
Perfetti van Melle’s MEA business runs a portfolio of confectionery brands across digital, retail media, and influencer channels in multiple markets, with KSA and Egypt among the largest programs.
The marketing technology stack had grown organically over several years: differing GTM configurations per market, inconsistent GA4 event schemas, no centralised consent management, and client-side tags firing without systematic governance. Across markets with different privacy postures — PDPL in KSA foremost — the compliance picture was fragmented and difficult to audit.
Two specific pressures brought the governance question to a head:
- GCC PDPL enforcement — Saudi Arabia’s PDPL had moved from enforcement-light to active. The existing tracking infrastructure could not demonstrate consent collection, data residency, or processor agreements at the level regulators expected.
- Media efficiency — without clean, consented, well-attributed data, programmatic campaigns were optimising on noisy signals. CPAs were rising and the team had limited confidence in the attribution numbers.
Emerge Digital was brought in to solve both — compliance and performance — as a unified program.
Our Approach
We structured the engagement as a five-month Walk phase, preceded by a three-week Crawl that produced a market-by-market compliance and analytics maturity map. The map scored each market across six dimensions: consent architecture, tag governance, data residency, attribution model quality, media signal quality, and reporting consistency.
The results established a clear prioritisation: KSA was the highest compliance risk; Egypt had the greatest media-efficiency opportunity; remaining markets could be rolled out from a template once the lead markets were done.
The Walk phase ran in three concurrent workstreams:
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Consent and data governance layer — We deployed a server-side GTM architecture in a PDPL-resident cloud environment, eliminating client-side third-party data egress. A centralised Consent Management Platform was configured with Arabic and English variants per market, storing consent records in an auditable log. All downstream tags — Google, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, DV360 — were wired through the server-side container, with consent signals enforced at the pipeline level.
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GA4 and analytics normalisation — We rebuilt the GA4 implementation across the regional markets to a single, versioned event schema. Custom dimensions mapped brand, market, campaign type, and product category consistently — enabling cross-market reporting for the first time. BigQuery export and a Looker Studio cross-market dashboard replaced disconnected local reports.
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Media signal quality and attribution — With clean, consented data flowing, we rebuilt the enhanced conversions configuration across Google and Meta, restoring signal quality that had degraded as cookies declined. We implemented a data-driven attribution model in BigQuery, calibrated to the FMCG purchase cycle (consideration-to-shelf periods of 2–8 weeks depending on market and SKU category). Channel-level CPAs were recalculated on the new model.
The Outcomes
- 34% reduction in media cost-per-acquisition, driven by improved signal quality, enhanced conversions, and reallocation of budget away from misattributed channels. The largest gains were in KSA and Egypt programmatic.
- PDPL-aligned consent, tag-governance, and data-residency architecture — deployed server-side, with consent enforced at the pipeline level rather than per-tag.
- Cross-market reporting deployed for the first time — regional marketing can now review brand performance across markets in a single dashboard, segmented by brand, channel, and market.
- Faster data availability — the server-side pipeline moved reporting from next-day to same-day, enabling in-flight campaign adjustments.
- A leaner tracking layer — the server-side migration eliminated redundant client-side scripts, improving site performance across the market websites.
The governance framework now gives each new Perfetti van Melle MEA market activation a template to onboard against rather than a bespoke build.