The power of connecting the digital shelf to retail media

Brands are improving retail media efficiency, winning new buyers and lowering costs by integrating digital shelf data into media campaigns.

If retail media has felt challenging lately, you’re in good company. Thanks to a perfect storm of macro factors and inherent problems within the retail media ecosystem, it’s started to feel, for many brands, like yet another problem consuming an ever-increasing share of budget. 

Today’s commerce landscape is making it increasingly difficult for brands to resonate with shoppers through media: 

• Sustained high prices in many categories have weakened consumer spending power, prompting them to scrutinize pricing differences and shift their trust and loyalty to brands that offer better value. 
• Retailers are rushing to meet consumer demands through widespread price cuts and expanded private label offerings.

• Retail media costs are rising fast. Double digit inflation in cost-per-click (CPC) has become the norm, with Skai reporting an 11% rise in CPCs year-on-year as of Q2. 

Even the most inspired media campaigns won’t reach shoppers who are only looking at prices. Adding insult to injury for brands, when lower product prices combine with higher CPCs, lofty ROAS goals become extremely difficult to meet.

At Profitero, we’ve observed a widening gap between the brands winning at retail media and those struggling to find their footing. For brands leading the way, it’s increasingly digital shelf data – not the perfect KPI, media mix, or attribution model – that serves as the missing piece. 

Is your media helping or hurting the brand experience? 

Media that effectively sparks positive brand experiences will grow sales – regardless of the retail media network (RMN), channel, media mix or budget. But brands are struggling to land on that formula proven to spark these positive brand experiences and convert into sales. 

Many brands are investing in audience data and attribution models to help them ensure campaign success, but these approaches aren’t addressing the underlying problem: Brands aren’t accounting for key indicators of the commerce environment that predict whether media will resonate with shoppers.

Is the product that shows up next to yours on a search results page less expensive? Is your main competitor out of stock? Digital shelf data and sophisticated algorithms have made it possible to track these key signals. 

The fact is, the brand experience is much more than strong ad creative

Consumers have positive brand experiences when they determine your product is appropriately priced and available for purchase. But if your product is listed at a higher price than its direct competitor in the search results next to it, or if your product is unavailable, your media ends in a negative brand experience, hurting sales. 

Even worse, your media spend ends up prompting shoppers to explore your competitors’ products when they’re most compelling. Our shopper research has found that 6 in 10 shoppers switch brands when their preferred product is unavailable.

Simply put: to effectively drive sales through media – especially online sales – your product must be available and competitively priced anywhere you’re advertising. Digital shelf signals provide the critical point of sale context that brands are missing to predict whether their retail media will drive positive or negative brand experiences.

Breaking the cycle

As retail media strategies try to keep up with today’s commerce environment, the result is an increasing share of budgets directed toward consumers in channels, moments in time, and geographic locations where their ad is unlikely to spark a positive brand experience or convert buyers. Buying more media doesn’t solve this – brands need to break the cycle of diminishing returns to drive more sales out of each media dollar spent. 

Digital shelf data boosts media efficiency by driving informed adjustments to media campaigns. But the data needs to fit specific criteria in order to be effective:

• Full category - Visibility into the pricing and availability of your competitors (including private label brands). 
• Granular - Daily, store-level digital shelf signals to effectively optimize campaigns.
• Reliable - Highly accurate data with minimal outages and the shortest possible lag.
• Accessible - Dashboards, integrations, APIs and exports along with automated tools to apply key insights to media campaigns. 
  
  

Let’s see what kind of brand uplift is possible when robust digital shelf data meets retail media.

Digital shelf data in action

Comprehensive digital shelf data helps brands adapt campaigns at a moment’s notice to protect their vulnerabilities and take advantage of their competitors. The secret lies in surfacing individual opportunities to win and seizing those opportunities at scale.

What happens when a top competitor’s product becomes 33% more expensive at a handful of Target locations, or suddenly goes out of stock? Most of the time, nothing. This is a missed opportunity to win sales from a competitor – and these opportunities are extremely common. On Amazon, for example, our data shows that the average product changes price 5x per month. 

Daily, store-level digital shelf data allows brands to pinpoint these openings and raise bids (to conquest competitor keywords or show ads) precisely when shoppers are most likely to have a positive brand experience of your products, and convert from your media. 

It’s not just conquesting that gets smarter. By knowing exactly where and when your brand is losing price competitiveness or going out of stock, you can lower bids to reduce media spend, conserving budget for more opportune moments. 

The combination of more intelligent defensive and offensive media strategies drives immediate results, including more new-to-brand (NTB) buyers, better ROAS, and more:

Below, Jean Philippe Nier, Kraft Heinz’s eCommerce Director of Retail & Food Service in Northern Europe, explains how his team used digital shelf data to drive campaign efficiency on Amazon during Prime Day:

And because the consumer’s brand experience is shaped by these factors no matter where the media is displayed, brands achieve uplift in DSP as well as search.

Profitero’s approach to retail media

We offer an end-to-end suite of customized tools and services to help your brand achieve retail media success. Our dedicated experts guide your teams every step of the way to craft holistic workflows and strategies that ensure you get the maximum possible uplift from our solutions:

• Understand where you are: We start by listening and asking questions to understand how your brand operates. We’ll benchmark your retail media strategy (both search and DSP) against best practices, identify what’s working and pinpoint opportunities to improve.
• Set yourself up for success: We help brands craft top-down strategies and ongoing action plans to integrate national media, retail media, organic search and PDP optimization with your agency. The result: new ways of working that ensure accountability and promote data democratization across teams.
• Execute smarter retail media: We supply the optimization tools your teams need to implement digital shelf-informed campaigns at scale. Shelf Intelligent Media augments your media strategy and agency capabilities by connecting our store-level digital shelf data to your bid management platform or DSP to automatically adjust bids. Your retail media campaigns will now account for shifts in availability and pricing as well as other factors, such as weather.
• Create compelling content: Finally, we offer an end-to-end Shelf Intelligent Content solution to boost conversion. From content health & compliance tracking to genAI content suggestions grounded in predictive analytics, Shelf Intelligent Content empowers brands with limited resources to scale optimized content across their entire portfolio.

As the industry’s #1 digital shelf provider, Profitero takes your retail media strategy to the next level through our best-in-class data and scalable solutions, all customized to your unique needs by a team of dedicated experts. If you're interested in learning more, fill out the form below and a member of our team will get in touch with you: