By Dean McElwee, Director, Global eCommerce Collaboration, Stanley Black & Decker
Retail Media is this year’s hot trend. And for good reason, it offers closed-loop attribution. So what is closed-loop attribution and why should you use it?
Well, when you place an advert you get traffic numbers or clicks, but that doesn’t tell you whether it resulted in a sale or conversion. You can get lots of traffic on a keyword, keep spending on it, but no impact on your sales. With closed-loop attribution, you ‘close the loop’ and track the conversions. This is extremely valuable as it allows you to validate and thus increase your spend on those items that convert. This is why you should be looking closely at retail media.
But what about in-store sales? Well, this is where many are spending their efforts. If I show you an advert in a digital context, on the website, can I see if you bought the product offline. This is important as so much of what we buy is digitally influenced. So how do you link it? Well, if you have a membership card or loyalty card, it is relatively simple. Membership cards like Sam’s Club will capture 100% of sales that go through online and offline as you can’t shop without them. Loyalty cards depend on how much goes through with a loyalty card. Mature programmes like Tesco Clubcard will have more than 80% of their sales linked to the card.
Sam’s club has done the membership route and linked the offline sales to an attribution window to help advertisers see both the online and offline effect of their retail media.
Expect to see more retailers chase this model this year as the race for branded suppliers’ marketing dollars hots up. It’s not ok to think that just having a retail media problem is job done. It has to have great analytics to back up the ask for spend.
Related item: Sam’s Club links its ad platform to offline sales – see the ModernRetail website
