Insider’s Guide to Scaling Your Retail Media Network

Congrats! You’ve launched a retail media network! With Forrester recently predicting that retail media revenue will balloon to $50 billion globally, it’s clear you’ve seized an opportunity in the fast-growing, new wave of digital advertising

For a while, only major retailers like Amazon and Walmart had the resources for retail media networks, which they could build in-house. Now, with the growth of third party connected retail media platforms smaller players can have their own retail media networks and access the same benefits.

Benefits of retail media networks

Here’s some key advantages of having a retail media network:

1. Increased monetization

With retail media networks, retailers supplement traditional revenue from shoppers with ad spend from brands who want their products in front of specific audiences. Margins are higher, too. According to Julie Jeancolas, Head of Global Media and Customer Engagement at dunnhumby, which specializes in consumer data science,

“For a retailer running their core business on a 2 to 4% percent margin, the prospect of setting up a retail media business that could run at 40% margin is pretty appealing.”  

This additional revenue helps give retailers price control, which can help them avoid immediately increasing prices, in the face of inflation and rising logistics costs.

Last year, U.S. marketers invested $31.5 billion in digital marketing through retail media networks — eMarketer expects this amount to surge by 31.4% in 2022.

2. First party data deepens the retailer-brand partnership

With retail media networks, brands sponsoring product listings on retailers’ sites can access granular, first party data surrounding consumer behavior, sales attribution, and loyalty to reach customers at the lowest part of the purchase funnel.

This quality, first party data is an alternative approach for brands dealing with the deprecation of third party cookies. It’s also difficult for brands operating on their own to get the quality and quantity of data that retailers can access.

 For perspective:

• Best Buy: The electronics retailer, which claims to have three billion customer interactions annually, gives its brand partners deep insights into those transactions, such as data relating to the point view of the purchase, pre-purchase consumer research, and the after-sales service.

• Walmart: With 240 million customers visiting the retail giant’s properties in-store or online properties each week, Walmart may be the world’s largest supply of shopper data across a variety of consumer products. Its demand-side platform (DSP) makes shopper data available to advertisers in a scaled and self-serve way.

When brands partner up with retailers, they are able to access data directly from the consumer, understand the nuances in shopper behavior, and refine their targeted, advertising approach.

3. Improved customer experience

Security and privacy

Harnessing customer data that is collected and owned by the website owner also translates to benefits for consumers concerned about privacy.

Despite Google postponing its sunsetting of cookies to 2024, data privacy is a key concern of consumers now. According to a Prosper Insights & Analytics Survey, 60% of consumers are concerned about their identity when shopping online.

Retal media networks are an effective way to help brands and retailers honor their customers’ concerns and reduce pressures on marketers who don’t wish to compromise consumer privacy.

Personalization

By leveraging quality first party consumer data, brands can deliver more personalized and impactful ads. Retailers can also show products that are most relevant to consumers so that they can find what they need quickly and efficiently, increasing CTR and CVR.

Ready to amplify your retail media network?

All these benefits, revenue growth, data access, and, personalization, create a powerful retail solution. But why stop there?  Enhance all these features by supercharging your existing retail media platform

Crealytics Middleware helps amp up your current solution so that all parties in the retail media ecosystem, including your existing retail media vendor, reap rewards.

Meet Crealytics Middleware

Crealytics Middleware sits on top of your existing vendors’ ad servers, connecting your demand partners to a fluid ad decisioning engine that displays products on a retailer’s website. This setup supercharges relevancy and revenue, as:

• It provides a gateway to different product ad sources, rather than just one demand source communicating directly with the ad server.

• Retailers can work with existing and new demand partners or even build a private marketplace on their existing single demand partner-enabled retail media network.

• Sponsored product results can be dynamic rather than static and consider organic search results.

With more relevant sponsored products:

• Consumers find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently.
• Brands connect with the right consumers on an even deeper level.
• Retailers are comfortable that UX doesn’t suffer with sponsored ads.

As a testament to relevancy, one retailer saw a change in CTR from 0.5% to over 2% upon the introduction of Crealytics Middleware, even as overall sponsored product ads revenue increased. Check out the case study.

With more relevant, sponsored product search results, retailers feel comfortable opening up more inventory to their existing retail media vendor and monetizing their product listings without jeopardizing the user experience.

Ready to use middleware with your retail media platform?

It only takes approximately four weeks, including testing and Q&A, to integrate Crealytics Middleware, an invisible technology layer, with your existing vendor. No changes to your web design are needed.

What are you waiting for?

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