Retail media advertising is having its moment.
“Retail media is following in the footsteps of search and social as digital advertising’s third big wave and has already established itself as a force,” says eMarketer in a new report on retail media. “Built on a foundation of valuable first-party purchase data, contextually relevant ad experiences, and closed-loop reporting, retail media is seeing advertiser budgets quickly migrating in its direction.”
And Q4 2022 is going to be a significant milestone for the channel. With consumer confidence low and inflation high, CPGs and other product brands will be anxiously watching their retail media performance during the holiday shopping season.
The bottom line: brands need their retail media advertising investments to perform solidly this Q4.
Retail media’s role in an omnichannel marketing approach
Of any ad channel, retail media probably benefits most from the other marketing activity in the marketing plan. Awareness channels drive consumers to learn and search about products, while consideration channels drive users to check pricing and options in online retailers.
As marketers continue to evolve their strategies to become more holistic and connected, the question arises: where does retail media best fit into an omnichannel marketing plan?
Furthermore, how might you think differently about your final retail media Q4 strategy to be more connected and integrated into the entire media plan?
Omnichannel retail media budgets: Marketers invest so much in the channel because the ROAS is exceptionally high. It would make sense during the holiday season to ensure that your retail media budgets are fully funded to handle the increased volume at this point in the year. That way, you can convert all the traffic your other channels drive to your retail partners.
Omnichannel retail media bids: Consumers are more willing to try new things during the holiday shopping season. If you have a subscribable, consumable product, you may want to bid higher than what may seem initially profitable. If you can build a new group of customers now, it could pay off wherever they decide to purchase—not to mention the halo effect when your new loyalists share how much they love your brand with their friends and family. An aggressive Q4 bid strategy could drive more offline and social media sales throughout the year.
Five Skai Automation Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers
In Q4, you don’t have time for lengthy daily analyses or deep, granular dives into performance. You need quick solutions that leverage innovative automation to take on the bulk of a task—that way, you and your team can focus on the high-value work that only human creativity and intuition can solve.
The following are five ways Skai’s retail media advertising clients can use our platform’s automation functionality to gain a competitive advantage this Q4.
Skai Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers #1 – Be jolly about negatives
As a retail media marketer, you learn quickly that keyword-based advertising can often trigger extremely or somewhat unrelated product searches.
Skai’s Search Term Analysis simplifies, streamlines, and automates the process of downloading, consolidating, and analyzing search terms. This helps retail media performance marketing teams use search term data to identify and cut out waste quickly.
The tool leverages machine learning and AI to cull through large volumes of data to recommend negative keywords that marketers may want to consider adding to their accounts. Instead of manually analyzing thousands of rows of raw search term data, simply review and approve scores of automatically categorized negative keyword recommendations ranked in order of estimated program impact.
“Skai’s Search Term Analysis is like having a high-tech detector within a minefield to help us identify and eliminate danger,” says one co-head of Amazon Advertising. “Before, we had to download hundreds of reports and use Excel, requiring at least 20 hours each week. Skai saves us endless time and money.”
Skai Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers #2 – Set alerts wherever you can so you can focus on other things
Q4 can be so hectic. It’s good to have an extra set of eyes on everything. Retail media advertising has a lot of rules and regulations that can pause your ads. For example, if you are not in the buy box or your advertising metrics are not profitable, your ads delivery may slow to a snail’s crawl.
Skai’s Automated Alerts can flag serving errors at the ad level so you can jump in and address them to improve your success. For just about any metric that is tracked in Skai, an Automated Alert can be set to notify you based on any condition you define.
A few examples include:
- Ad groups don’t hit a certain revenue target
- Ads drop below a specified click-through rate (CTR)
- Keywords go above a certain conversion rate
Email alerts can be triggered by anything you can filter in Skai. And it doesn’t have necessarily to be about bad things—you can set Automated Alerts to let you know when good things happen such as if a campaign drives over a set amount of revenue in a day. This way you might be able to react quickly to take advantage of opportunities.
Skai Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers #3 – Zero in on the most valuable impressions using dayparting
Even outside of Q4, most marketers don’t have the budget to bid on every relevant ad impression across every retail media publisher. When you factor in the increased traffic to online retailers during the holiday shopping season, marketers have to be even pickier about which ads are most desirable.
It’s about finding that needle in a haystack. Meaning, if you can only afford 1 in every 1000 retail media ad impressions, then how do you ensure that you’re bidding properly on the right .1%?
Marketers know that certain times during the day are worth more money than others, so many use dayparting strategies to control when their products are bought and sold. Not every retail media publisher offers time-based scheduling, but you can use Skai’s Automated Actions to modify your bids based on the hours you would like to target—effectively dayparting with this workaround.
One strategy you may want to consider and test is to bid less earlier in the day during the heaviest parts of the season. You may want to save your budget for later in the day when some of your rivals’ budgets begin to cap. Then, when their daily budgets run out, you can swoop in and get low-priced clicks.
Skai Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers #4 – Two words: portfolio bidding
In any auction-based media channel such as retail media advertising, bidding correctly cannot be overstated as a critical success factor. Bid too low and you won’t get in enough ad auctions or be able to spend your budget. But, if you bid too high, you will waste your budget on clicks you could have paid less for and you won’t maximize your opportunity.
Publisher-provided automated bidding is something that is pretty rare in retail media advertising. While it will most likely be commonplace in the future, today, Skai’s Portfolio Bid Optimization. enables retail media marketers to set campaign goals that the platform will try to reach using automated bids.
“Skai’s Portfolio Bid Optimizations, Dimensions, and Portfolios were critical in executing efficient DSP and Sponsored Ads campaigns enabling us to lift ROAS to 461%,” says Matt Strietelmeier, Director, Amazon Advertising at Stella Rising.
Skai Q4 Tips for Retail Media Marketers #5 – Never, ever run out of budget during the holidays
You cannot let your marketing campaigns run out of funds unexpectedly during Q4. Some campaigns may be hotter during heavy shopping days, so you may unexpectedly hit your budget caps in the middle of the day.
Use Skai’s Automated Actions to set rules that will automatically add more budget to your campaign if it falls below a certain amount. This way, you will keep spending and ensure that your campaigns run smoothly.
The last thing you want to do in January is to have to explain to your boss or client why Q4 sales were limited simply because some of your campaigns ran out of budget.
Skai helps retail media marketers win the omnichannel holiday season
As part of Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart all in one place.
Client results include:
- 461% increase in Amazon Ads ROAS and 57% increase in page traffic for Bondi Sands
- 92% increase in share of voice on Amazon for a Fortune 500 CPG brand
- 72% increase in revenue for VTech
- 1,390% year-over-year sales growth for Kamado Joe
For more information about how Skai’s Retail Media solution can help you win your omnichannel holiday season—and beyond into 2023- why not schedule a quick demo to see our cutting-edge social innovation firsthand?
