Once seen as primarily an opportunity for huge brands, retail media networks are open to marketplace sellers (3P) of all sizes. These networks allow sellers to target on-site search ads, product display ads, and even reach shoppers off-site via retailer data. For marketplace sellers, retail media represents a major opportunity to promote their products and unlock growth (more about the opportunity). However, for sellers to fully capitalize on this potential, they need the right analytics in place. Existing retail media dashboards provide metrics like clicks, impressions, CPC, and ROAS. But these only reveal part of the performance story. Without connecting your retail media analytics to crucial e-commerce backend data, it’s impossible to do true performance optimization.
Luckily, marketplace sellers have access to more data and at a more granular level than the "average" wholesaler.
In this post, we’ll explore the limitations of current retail media analytics, show how advanced analytics unlocks growth, and outline the key features marketplace sellers should look for, especially when using a marketplace aggregator.
The limitations of current Retail Media analytics
For most advertisers, whether brands or sellers, the analytics they get from retail media networks are limited. While they provide helpful metrics like ROAS, clicks, and impressions, these only reveal part of the performance picture. There are several major limitations to existing retail media reporting:
- Inability to connect media spend to organic sales performance
- Lack of historical price and stock level visibility
- No detailed product catalog analysis
- No modeling of true ROAS based on backend costs like fulfillment or returns
- …
The lack of connection to crucial e-commerce data therefore means marketplace sellers are optimizing campaigns with blinders on. To truly maximise the ROI of retail media, they need advanced analytics that provide, if not complete, then far better context.
Expanding your view with advanced analytics
To overcome the limitations of current retail media analytics, marketplace sellers need solutions that connect their advertising data to key backend systems which store high value data. This provides an expanded and unique view of performance and unlocks superior optimization.
Platforms like Channeladvisor, Lengow or Channelengine used by sellers can incorporate crucial data to expand visibility across marketplaces:
- Calculate true ROAS including fulfillment costs and returns. See real profitability by connecting media spend to backend order data.
- Access paid and organic sales data together. Analyze the total sales impact of campaigns, including on organic rank and sales. Refine targeting and creatives based on organic sales patterns.
- Visualize historical pricing and stock levels from product feeds. Optimize campaign timing and budgets based on seasonality and historical stockouts.
- Leverage your product catalog to analyze performance by product, category, or market. Identify your fastest selling products to optimize promotion.
- Monitor Buy Box percentage to optimize campaigns for maximum time in the Buy Box, which is key on Amazon
- Monitor your competitors to see how their strategy and actions can affect your results
With these advanced analytics, marketplace sellers gain full context to make data-driven decisions about retail media in a way that brands cannot in a wholesale model.
The key is accessing and connecting the disjointed data already in your e-commerce systems. This is where mimbi can help , with dedicated Channeladvisor and Lengow connectors, among others.
In essence, advanced analytics transforms retail media from a "spray and pray" vanity exercise to a truly data-driven engine for profitable growth. Instead of reactive manual management, automations do the heavy lifting to optimize budget allocations, fine-tune targeting, adjust product pricing, and feed insights back to organic listing strategies. But it requires shedding outdated metrics and making the connections to unlock the true potential of retail media analytics.
If you are ready to move to the next phase of your commerce journey as a marketplace seller, contact us now!
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