Skai’s First of It’s Kind Social-to-Retailer Ad Innovation: Dynamic Commerce Ads (DCA)

Rachel Cornell
Product Marketing Manager @ Skai

May 11, 2022

Even if most of your product sales are still offline, the online channel is just as important, with 87% of shoppers beginning product searches online.

Product discovery and research can happen almost anywhere online: search engines, social media, retailer websites, etc. Therefore, it’s essential for today’s brands to understand and master every major consumer engagement point—especially how best they can impact and influence purchase decisions.

Marketers know this and are taking action.

According to recent Skai research, more than 8 out of 10 (80.7%) retail media marketers use paid social and paid search to drive traffic to their product pages on online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

Source: The State of Retail Media 2022 (Skai/BWG Strategy)

Skai offers a unique ad solution to help product brands create a more seamless, social-to-retailer customer experience.

This groundbreaking innovation won’t be found in any other advertising platform other than Skai.

Introducing Skai’s new social-to-retailer ad innovation: Dynamic Commerce Ads (DCA)

Your customer is on Instagram or Facebook, and one of your product ads catches their attention. Before now, your choice was to either send that ad traffic to a specific retailer or bring them to your website and offer them links to their retailer of choice.

So, which do you pick?

Send them to Amazon? Maybe they want it today? Send them to Walmart or Target? Perhaps they’d rather order through their Prime account.

Bring them to your website? Yes, they can click a link under the Available at These Fine Retailers section. But, of course, you will most likely lose some folks in the funnel when the impulse buy effect wears off.

Skai’s new Dynamic Commerce Ads (DCA) solves this dilemma.

With DCA, your social ads now have multiple links to where your products are sold. Let your customer choose which retailers they want to buy from within the ad unit—but most importantly, it dynamically brings up-to-date information that can keep friction down in the buying process.

DCA Highlights

Connect to your most critical retail partners. Currently supports Amazon, Walmart, and Target—with more retailers in the works.
Skai automatically keeps your product details in sync. DCAs showcase up-to-date info such as availability, price, and star rating.
Won’t waste your budget. If a product is out of stock at a retailer, that partner won’t show in the ad.

It’s that simple—a complete, end-to-end solution for social-to-retail advertising.

No manual updating: unique “dynamic” innovation

Yes, social advertisers can use Facebook Ads to advertise multiple retailers in a single
creative format, but it’s the dynamic aspect of Skai’s Dynamic Commerce Ads that is the new option here for marketers.

Product ads of any kind just can’t be static because item information and availability change too often. That’s why Google and Facebook shopping campaigns are refreshed daily via ecommerce feeds.

But, for DCA, we don’t use your ecommerce feed. Why? “First, because connecting to retailers’ feeds is traditionally a very cumbersome process that can only be accomplished through more limited ad types such as Collaborative Ads. Also, products go in and out of stock throughout the day. So a nightly refresh from a feed isn’t good enough.

Additionally, while you may know your MSRP, retailer algorithms are constantly changing prices and promotions based on various signals that can’t be tracked unless it’s pulled directly from the online stores in near real-time. Finally, some product information—such as star ratings—isn’t in your feed, it’s only on the retailers’ websites.

Skai’s proprietary retailer monitoring refreshes product-level data multiple times a day. This ensures that your Dynamic Commerce Ads are updated often and provide the most benefit to your marketing investment. Our monitoring capabilities are part of the new marketing intelligence functionality we gained when we acquired market intelligence vendor, Signals-Analytics, last year.

As our CMO, Margo Kahnrose wrote at the time:

Acquiring Signals Analytics earlier this year allowed us to connect rich internal and marketing data to a powerful breadth of external sources, numbering in the tens of thousands. From this comprehensive base, we can, of course, enrich our marketing execution applications with better smarts. But we can also do so much more, addressing the needs for agility and connectivity between the stages of go-to-market that come both BEFORE and AFTER marketing execution for better planning and accurate measurement.

DCA is just one of the first examples of Skai’s continuing mission to enhance marketing execution with marketing intelligence.

An added bonus: get more intelligent about consumer preferences

Not only will you drive more traffic to your retail partners, but Dynamic Commerce Ads can teach you a few things about your customer’s buying trends, such as:

Which retailers do consumers seem to prefer for certain products and product categories
How do the different combinations of the product metadata impact your performance
Run multiple ads per DCA template to measure the impact of your creative

Better performance, more streamlined customer experience, and added insights!

DCAs only available with Skai

Dynamic Commerce Ads is a groundbreaking solution that you won’t find with any other social advertising platform, only Skai’s Paid Social solution.

As part of Skai’s intelligent marketing platform, our Paid Social solution has unique, best-in-class capabilities to automate, optimize, and scale your ads at an enterprise level. In a privacy-first world, Skai offers integrated solutions to reach consumers on all the platforms that matter and drive powerful growth no other independent social platforms can achieve.

Client results include:

For more information or to see our cutting-edge innovation for yourself, set up a brief demo today.

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