Your product feed should give the most accurate representation of your products

Once you know you have the right tracking in place, the next important element to crack is your product feed. Taking Google’s Merchant Centre or PMax as an example, if you have uncategorised products and inaccurate accompanying product information then these engines will be reasoning from the misclassification of your feed. Ill-performing retail media placements aren’t random; they are based on the information (or lack of information) you have provided.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider if one of your products is a red, zip-up jacket and you’ve categorised it simply as a ‘coat’ then your product isn’t going to appear when those high-intent shoppers are searching for a red jacket. Cleaning up your feed allows retail media algorithms to work in unison with your sales, rather than against them.

Retail media should optimise towards profit, not sales

Like any other channel, measurement is incredibly important in retail media. It’s not enough to make revenue gains from product sales. We need to consider every element that can affect sales: retail ad fees, manufacturing costs, shipping fees, sale prices, returns & warranties and product competition. Without a view on this, you are only seeing half the measurement picture and are at an increased risk of profit loss.

The strongest retail media strategy will focus on profit as a growth driver, not sales.

There’s no doubt that there are many exciting opportunities in retail media. To make the most of them, you must ensure that your first party tracking, product feed and measurement frameworks are setting you up for success. The impact of taking these steps can be phenomenal. It’s an approach we took with the retailer JML and within three months we delivered an 825% increase in profits compared to the same period in the previous year.

If you want to find out if you are set up for retail media success, get in touch.