The evolution of technology not only fuels big leaps forward in capabilities, but it also transforms how we manage the fundamentals that drive sales. Here are five key essential ingredients to supercharge retail media performance.
Planning retail media
The retail media landscape is both fragmented and fast-paced, making it harder to stay on top of the latest developments. Rapidly evolving media capabilities, data opportunities, partnerships and audience insights demand agility.
Activating across diverse retailers, from local players such as Noon, to global players like Amazon, presents additional challenges: ad tech, buying models, data-sharing, metrics, and attribution windows will vary significantly from retailer to retailer.
We can now analyse the landscape using multiple sources to classify and prioritise retailers and deliver holistic recommendations for clients. Using WPP Open Media Studio we have automated this crucial step, allowing us to account for even more data points such as traffic spotting and growth potential by retailer. This leads to a more dynamic output that is constantly evolving, like the landscape.
Optimising commerce content
AI can now be used to scan product information and make recommendations, which means the quality and relevance of content will impact ranking, visibility and product recommendations like never before.
Consumers are no longer the sole audience; AI algorithms now evaluate content to ensure compliance against necessary standards and score accordingly. Good content alone is not enough. A+ content, comparison tools and enhanced ratings and reviews are now standard practice across stock keeping units (SKU) and are key factors that AI considers when assessing ranking.
To achieve the highest scores, it’s essential to have tools and technology monitoring content scores across brand and competitor pages to enhance visibility. This is where the beauty of retail media and the use of retailer first-party data comes into play. By mining their first-party audience data and consumer insights, brands can create truly unique and relevant content.
Enabling SKU level optimisation
Not every SKU is a hero. Some are category leaders, some are gap fillers, and some have the potential to unlock new subcategories.
A tailored approach is critical for maximising each SKU’s potential and aligning them with overall business objectives. We use proprietary technology to assess performance in real-time against clients’ key KPIs, making portfolio management and KPI-based mapping essential. This empowers informed decision-making, leveraging data as signals to drive media optimisation.
Driving operational health
Operational health is all about ensuring stock levels are healthy and priced competitively. Manual management of these is nearly impossible in today’s world, especially in large organisations. Even the best strategies can fail if operational health isn’t checked. It’s no good ranking first on an e-commerce platform if a client’s order can’t be fulfilled. Running out of stock or losing the buy box disrupts the optimisation’s momentum, resulting in lost sales and visibility setbacks.
Investing in digital shelf tools can automate stock and pricing checks, providing real-time alerts for operational excellence. Bid automation tools can also address overstock and understock challenges with automated rules.
Optimising keywords
Keyword optimisation is crucial, especially with the rise of AI as a shopper assistant. Understanding how AI predicts consumer needs; influences search results; and recommends products is fundamental to shaping our search strategies.
A forward-thinking approach that considers both consumer trends and AI algorithms, using digital shelf insights and bid automation tools, should be adopted to ensure market share win.
Having said all the above, I cannot conclude without emphasising the importance of monitoring performance across the full consumer path to purchase, as well as the performance relative to the category using the full technology stack available.
Today, automation and technology are essential for executing the fundamentals of commerce. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s more important than ever to leverage technology to achieve brilliant basics, that
in turn will help achieve sustainable growth for business.
By Haneen Aburrubb, E-commerce Lead, GroupM MENA.
