If you keep up with e-commerce news, you already know retail media is taking the industry (and perhaps larger advertising world) by storm. Need proof?
- In just five years, retail media has accomplished what took digital ads 14 years and social media 11 years to achieve: $30 billion in revenue.
- Retail media is predicted to reach $45 billion this year alone and grow an incredible 60% by 2027.
- One-quarter of retailers are generating more than $100 million in revenue from their media networks.
Consumers are growing more accustomed to retail media too. In fact, 42% of global consumers say they’ve clicked on a Sponsored or Promoted Product ad in the past 12 months.
As retail media embeds itself deeper into the fabric of the e-commerce industry, brands must reallocate budgets to stand out and connect with consumers — all while maintaining efficiency.
In our latest webinar, The Return of Ad Spend: How to Increase the Efficiency of Your Retail Media Campaigns, ChannelAdvisor experts provide tips and key learnings to help you balance your retail media strategy and maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Establish ROAS Goals Across Strategies
Every advertiser strives for advertising efficiency to bring in the highest revenue for the lowest spend. But at what point does that efficiency limit your long-term success on a particular advertising platform?
Establishing individual ROAS goals for each of your targeting strategies is important for measuring overall growth and keeping your account constantly generating new-to-brand customers. These goals help create overall efficiency for your account while maintaining balanced growth.
For instance, you might achieve a goal ROAS of $12.50 with various targets across strategies:
Together, all of these strategies and results help achieve your goal or average ROAS.
Optimize Campaigns and Allocate Investment According to ROAS Goals
Once your ROAS goals are established and your campaigns are up and running, optimizing your performance can help you actually achieve your targets. Depending on the ad platform, you can make these optimizations manually or (ideally) automatically to continually improve while making your job easier.
Inefficient campaigns fail to recoup your investment. Conversely, campaigns that are too efficient slow your overall growth. In response, try:
- Increasing your daily budgets so campaigns meet their ceilings
- Testing new creatives
- Increasing your overall ad budget
Ad investment should also go hand in hand with your ROAS goals. For instance, if you’re prioritizing efficiency and hoping to increase ROAS, invest more heavily in brand protection. Brand protection campaigns include branded keyword bids and product detail page ad placements and typically perform at a high ROAS since customers are closer to their buying decisions.
If you’re in a growth phase, however, it’s wiser to invest more heavily in customer acquisition and conquesting strategies like non-branded keywords, category exploration and clicks versus conversions. By thinking about your strategy in phases, you can invest spend with flexibility as your goals change.
Shift Strategy and Goals to Match the Customer Journey
Another approach to strategic planning and budget allocation is to consider the customer journey and marketing funnel from start to finish. By matching your strategy to the customer journey, you can start to identify goals beyond just meeting a ROAS target.
Want to increase new-to-brand customers? Need to improve conversions? Once you identify these goals and priorities, you can identify appropriate budget allocations to each stage of the customer journey from awareness to consideration to conversion and beyond. Each phase includes several campaign types and targeting types for full coverage and full visibility on your advertising platform.
For every channel you sell on and every campaign you launch, ChannelAdvisor can help you optimize your strategies from a centralized platform. Whether you’re growing brand awareness or chasing new ROAS targets, we help you automate your execution and focus on the right levers to achieve your overall business goals. Most importantly, by combining the strength of our technology with the experience of our e-commerce experts, we’re able to streamline your retail media campaigns setup, management and tracking — helping deliver sales growth and a higher return on your ad spend.
Download the full webinar, The Return of Ad Spend: How to Increase the Efficiency of Your Retail Media Campaigns, for a breakdown of each retail media strategy, as well as tips, stats and tricks to make the most of your campaigns across marketplaces and retail media networks.