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