Retail Media
Introduction
Retail Media is an advertising approach where brands promote products within retail environments, such as online search results or product recommendations.
Hello Retail provides a centralized and user-friendly tool within your dashboard to manage these campaigns across Recommendations, Search, Pages, and Newsletters.
The Hello Retail product intelligence system (an AI service identifying product relationships) searches for alternative products that match the attribute criteria defined in your Retail Media campaigns. If suitable products are found, they are inserted, based on their popularity, into the placements specified in your Retail Media Settings.
Overview
Within the Hello Retail Dashboard, you can find the entry into Retail Media in your sidebar, from where you can set up and manage your Retail Media Campaigns. The menu item provides a single entry point for handling all your Retail Media marketing strategies and brand promotions. Here you can configure how the strategy should be implemented in your Search, Recommendations, Pages, and Newsletters, and gain insight into how your setup is performing.
This article will explain what you are able to define under Settings and Campaigns, and how you can interpret the performance statistics available under Analytics.
Settings
On the Settings Page, you can establish the fundamental structure of your Retail Media configuration. This involves specifying the number of product placements within your listings to be reserved for promoted items and the positions where these placements will occur. If no positions are selected for a particular solution, Retail Media products will not appear in those listings and will not interact with your Hello Retail setup.
Recognizing that user interaction differs between desktop and mobile due to varying screen sizes and layouts, you can configure distinct positions for each device type. This global configuration will be applied to all your campaigns, including those currently active.
The device toggle enables customized setups. For example, if your mobile recommendations are displayed as a single-item slider, you can designate promoted products to appear in the first position for increased visibility. This principle applies to other features where fewer items are typically visible on a mobile screen at once. It's important to note that a product's impression within a Retail Media campaign is registered regardless of whether the item is visually present on the viewer's screen. Consequently, if a slider contains four promoted products, but the visitor only views the first, all four will still be counted as impressions for the campaign.
Campaigns
To start creating your first campaign, you can go over to the Campaign page and click on “Create Campaign”. In this section, the individual campaigns are created and maintained. A campaign can then be set up to either promote specific products or a subset of products based on attributes and conditions (Brand, Hierarchy or any Extra Data Point).
To stay on top of all of the Retail Media Campaigns that you are running, you have the option to add an Email Address so that an automated email is sent upon completion of the campaign. Campaigns can either conclude based on Date, Clicks, or Impressions, which you can learn about further below.
Products
Within the products section, you can add promoted products or a subset of products based on attributes and conditions to your campaign.
Promoted products are added to the campaign, either by pasting the URL of the requested item into the search field or by searching for the title of the item. The products found are then reserved for the first positions in the campaign, given the definition that was previously decided upon in the Settings tab, before evaluating the further conditions.
The products and attributes section lets you create rules that the system can use to include a certain subset of products in the campaign. This can be done in versatile ways. You can use AND conditions to create a filter that combines multiple different fields (e.g., Pants from a specific brand). With the OR conditions, you can add multiple different separate filters into the setup (e.g., pants from a different brand than before). Using this, you can tune the setup to exactly include the product set that you want within your Retail Media Campaign. Within the most popular of the products, sharing these attributes is shown within the campaign, and will be added to the chosen positions following the order of their popularity as long as they have the same relevance for the search term. If the campaign also contains promoted products, then items sharing the promoted brand are added after these.
Campaign Specific Placements
Campaign-specific placements are a powerful way for you to get a bit more specific on a single campaign. With these placements, you can both disable placements that are set on the global level as well as create separate placements that are only created for this specific campaign. You can do so by clicking on the placement in the overview to enable or disable it. You can see the specific and global placement by their different colours in the overview, when you have a combination of those.
In case you have defined a specific placement for a campaign, but that campaign's products do not get shown in the global placements due to a lower relevancy or CPM, this campaign's products nevertheless can get shown within the specific placements.
Schedule
The Schedule is where the active period, during which the campaign should be in effect, can be defined. You can either choose to have the campaign run with a defined start and end date after which the campaign automatically concludes or have a continuous campaign that runs until the point where you disable it.
Campaign Goals
With campaign goals, you are able to set a goal for a campaign to automatically conclude, when a certain target value is reached. These can be defined both for Impressions and clicks on your products.
In the case where you both have a fixed campaign end date and a campaign goal defined, the campaign will conclude based on which of the goals is reached first.
Analytics
The default view displays combined performance data for all active, inactive, and archived campaigns over the past month if no specific campaigns are selected. This aggregate data includes all active features within each campaign, such as Recommendations, Search, Pages, and Newsletter. To view performance metrics for individual campaigns, click on the campaign name in the section below the general statistics.
Here is how to interpret the figures shown in the Analytics panel:
Impressions: Retail Media impressions are only counted when the system actively promotes a product to a higher position than it would normally occupy. Standard recommendations or search results featuring promoted products do not count as impressions unless Hello Retail's AI injects and shifts those products based on campaign attributes and popularity.
In this way, only products that are not “found organically” in a Search query by the visitors themselves, or don’t naturally have a top placement in Recommendations, Pages or Newsletters but instead are shown as a result of the Hello Retail product intelligence, will be counted when reporting how the campaign has performed.
Clicks: When a user clicks on a promoted product (either moved up or swapped in by the system), it is registered as a click. This section of the dashboard lists these clicked products.
It's important to note that Retail Media campaigns tend to have a lower click-through rate (CTR) compared to other dashboard features due to the counting method. Each product displayed within a campaign counts as an impression. However, a click is only registered when a product is actually clicked.
For example, if a product page recommendation displays four campaign products, this will result in four impressions. Since visitors usually click on only one of these products, a single click out of four impressions will naturally lead to a lower CTR.
Sold items: Sold items:A purchase of a promoted product is attributed to a Retail Media campaign if the same item is bought within seven days of a click originating from the campaign, and the purchase occurs in a session with the same cookie as the initial click. Only the specific promoted item bought this way is counted, not any other items in the same order. Accurate statistics depend on detailed conversion tracking that includes the individual item price and the quantity sold for each item in an order. Hello Retail requires this level of detail, and the tracking requirements are outlined in the Hello Retail Documentation on conversion tracking.
Styling the output
If you require that the promoted products in a Retail Media campaign gets a badge added, or that they are otherwise styled in a way, that sets them apart from the other products, then you can check for the existence of retailMediaCampaignId in the response.
Once an item in your webshop is moved to a higher position in the Search, or is promoted in either Recommendations, Pages or Newsletter, as a consequence of a campaign, then the response from the Hello Retail system will include a reference to the specific ID of this campaign. You can therefore check for the existence of either just "anything" in that field, or indeed check for the specific ID, in order to add your styling:
For a general reference on the Product Object and the retailMediaCampaignId-field, we refer to developer.helloretail.com.
For a practical example of using this in the context of the Hello Retail liquid templates, see the following:
Initially, inside the product loop, a check is made for the existence of a retailMediaCampaignId. This could be extended to look for a specific campaign, and assign a value for that, to be used later in the loop:
Following this, a custom class can then be added to the HTML of the rendered product tile:
This class can either reference existing CSS on your webshop, or the styling of the element can be defined in the Hello Retail template as well.
Q&A
The following section is an attempt to explicitly list a few of the questions that we expect could arise, in the process of setting up this feature. If you are having trouble with something that is not listed here, don't hesitate to get in touch with support@helloretail.com
Q: Can I create feature-specific campaigns, so for instance create 2 campaigns each for a different brand, but where only one of the campaigns is featured in the Search?
A: Yes, with Campaign Specific Placements, this is easily doable.
Q: If I have 2 Retail Media campaigns running at the same time. Which one will be shown, if my customers are searching for something which matches the criteria in both campaigns?
A: There is an evaluation happening on our side that matched both on the relevancy and CPM value that you provided for the campaign.
Q: Can I have a Retail Media campaign set up for Initial content (products shown in Search before typing)?
A: No, not yet.
Q: Are promoted products only featured in the search, if the user has searched for the specific title of that product?
A: No. The search set can be a result of either an explicit Synonym or an AI synonym or of the user searching for something very broad and non-descriptive as well. A promoted product will however only be included and moved to a featured position if it was somehow already present in the set, to begin with. This should reflect the ambition, that your campaigns should get maximum exposure, but that the products shown should also make sense, with respect to what the user is doing on your site.
Q: If I am already boosting specific brands or product attributes in my Search configuration, how will this affect the Retail Media campaigns I am setting up?
A: There are many different tools in the Hello Retail dashboard, which allows you to configure the behaviour of your Search, in order to favour certain parts of the catalogue. This can be achieved through Synonyms and Stop Words, Boosts, Fixed Products and Removed Products, just as the behaviour will be affected by the activation of AI synonyms, Personalised settings and the overall mode of how the search engine itself is matching input with the product data (does it guess a lot, or does it require a very strict matching pattern). This is all to say, that there are many available settings that can impact why a certain product has a certain position in the result set. In order to ensure the highest degree of exposure for your Retail Media campaign, these have been given the highest priority, so when different settings might work in different directions, these campaigns will always overrule any other settings.
Q: I am using the Hello Retail API for Recommendations and Search. What do I need to be aware of?
A: Besides adding a property for the desired device type to the request, thus enabling Hello Retail to know which of the two basic settings it should use, no further modifications to your API-setup should be needed, as long as the requirements listed at http://developer.helloretail.com are met.
Q: Will the products shown as part of a Retail Media campaign also adhere to any filters defined for my Recommendations or Newsletter setup?
A: Only global filters are respected, while individual source filters on recommendation steps are skipped. So, for a front page recommendation that has a global filter, specifying that items shown should have a price under 50 EUR and be in the category "T-shirts", a promoted product from your campaign will not be shown, if it doesn't adhere to this. In a setup, with a stepwise increase of say price limits, a promoted product could be shown, even though it may have a price that is different from the filter used in the source where it is coming from.
Q: If customers are using the sorting options that I have available in Search and Pages, will my Retail Media campaigns still be shown?
A: No. If a Search set or a Pages rendition is sorted on something else that popularity, any promoted items are removed, but are then also not counted in the statistics.
Q: When customers are searching for subdivisions of a word - like “sho“ before writing the full intended word “shoe“ - does that then count as a search with a Retail Media impression?
A: Typing parts of a query is generally not regarded as "a search" and should therefore not be listed as an impression. A time factor is involved in deciding when a user has searched for something, and this same principle is used when registering impressions for a Retail Media campaign.