Retail Media
Introduction
Retail Media is an advertisement strategy, where brands seek to promote their products directly through retail outlets, such as in the search results or the product recommendations of a webshop. As a customer with Hello Retail, your dashboard includes an easily manageable tool for handling this in a single place, throughout the features that we provide - these being Recommendations, Search, Pages and Newsletter. Particularly time-saving, is the combination of our Search functionality and AI-based product intelligence, enabling you to set up campaigns that features these products in the search results, without the need to define and maintain a long list of search terms and synonyms to these.
Overview
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
In the settings tab, you define the overall structure of your Retail Media setup. Here you can configure how many products you wish to reserve for promotions, and on what positions the setup should take effect. If no positions are selected/outlined for a given service, then Retail Media will not be affecting that part of your setup with Hello Retail.
As there are some differences in how visitors engage with your webshop on either desktop or mobile devices, the menu reserves an option to define a different number of products and positions for each of these device types - but besides this, you can only have one global setup, the configuration of which will apply to all the campaigns that you will be creating in the future.
The device toggle allows you to adjust the setup so that, for instance, if your recommendations on mobile are shown as a slider with only 1 item at a time, then the promoted products can be set to show on the first position, where it would get a lot more attention. The same goes for the remaining features, where on mobile typically fewer items are visually present on the screen at any given time. On this topic, it is also worth to state, that the registering of a product being shown as part of a retail Media campaign, is not relying on that item being visually present on the viewer’s screen. If a slider contains 4 promoted products, but the visitor on the shop is not sliding past the first one, it will still be regarded as 4 impressions for that campaign.
Campaigns
In this section, the individual campaigns are created and maintained. Fundamentally, a campaign can promote either specific products, a specific brand, or a combination of the two.
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.
A promoted brand is added through the search field as well. With a promoted brand, the most popular of the products sharing this brand are reserved for the campaign, and will be added on the chosen positions following the order of their popularity. If the campaign also contains promoted products, then items sharing the promoted brand are added after these.
The Schedule is where the active period, during which the campaign should be in effect, can be defined.
Analytics
If no specific campaigns are chosen, the overview will simply list the performance statistics for all campaigns, both for the active, inactive and archived campaigns, for the default period of 1 month. The numbers shown, are a sum of all the individual features, that the campaign is active in, so both Recommendations, Search, Pages and Newsletter are listed as one.
In order to see the performance of specific campaigns, you will need to click the name of the campaign first, in the section present below the general stats.
Here is how to interpret the figures shown in the Analytics panel:
Impressions: As a general principle for Retail Media as this is handled by Hello Retail, whenever a product is shown as a result of the normal behaviour of the Hello Retail system, the impression is not counted in the statistics of Retail Media.
So, if a visitor on your site is being shown a Recommendation or a Search result, which includes a product that you have defined as promoted in a Retail Media campaign, this will only be counted in the statistics if Hello Retail is actively involved in shifting the position of a product, to a higher and more noticeable place in the listing than what it would otherwise have. The Hello Retail product intelligence (our AI-based service for establishing product relations) is seeking to find alternative products for the first shown items, given that these products share the attributes defined in one of your Retail Media campaigns. If such items exist, the system will inject these, in order of popularity, into the positions defined in the Settings.
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: For all services, a user clicking a promoted product will be registered as a such. That is, only products that either have been moved up, or have been swapped in by the system, will be listed here, when they have been clicked by a visitor on your site.
Note here, that the way the statistics are counted for a Retail Media campaign means, that a lower CTR (Clickthrough rate) is to be expected when compared to other features in the dashboard. This is because every product in a campaign is counted as an impression when it is shown, while it is only the products that are clicked, that count as Clicks. So, for a product page recommendation that is showing 4 campaign products, this will be registered as 4 impressions but, as visitors typically only visit 1 of these products at any given time, the registering of a single click per the 4 impressions, will naturally produce a low CTR.
Sold items: If clicking a promoted product eventually leads to a purchase of this same item, it is regarded as being bought as a result of the campaign. The purchase needs to be registered in a session where the same cookie that initially clicked the item is present, within 24 hours, before a sale is attributed to a Retail Media campaign.
Only those specific items bought in this way, are counted, and not any additional items that may be part of the same order.
For this reason, Hello Retail are emphasising the need to supply a detailed version of conversion tracking if the statistics shown here are to be accurate. The requirements for how tracking should be handled are listed here: https://developer.helloretail.com/sdk/tracking/conversion_tracking/#conversion-tracking-using-the-sdk and involve that the tracking includes an individual item-price as well as a count for how many of a given item was sold as part of the order.
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: The global configuration in the settings tab will be the template that all campaigns are following. To achieve this exclusivity, you could set up the 2 campaigns with a different schedule, so that they are not active in the same timeframe.
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: For the time being, this is simply handled so that both campaigns are shown with an equal probability.
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.