Developing a Cross-Marketplace Prioritization Strategy

As digital marketing channels continue to expand, retail media networks predict ad revenue will increase by as much as 75% on marketplaces. That is a significantly more competitive landscape for brands selling products online, making every decision that much more important. 

Navigating Your Options

As a brand marketer with so many choices in the retail media landscape, it will be hard to tackle all of it at once. In addition to choosing which marketplace on which to sell and promote products, you also have to consider decisions such as:

• Product mix: will you sell the same products on all marketplaces? 

• Ad support: will you support all products with paid ad spend, or just select ones?

So what should you do? Just as you’d expect: develop a prioritization strategy. With hundreds or even thousands of SKUs across multiple marketplaces, the key to winning is having a holistic strategy centered around prioritization. Below, we share efficient methods of prioritizing optimizations across marketplaces that allocate your efforts, and your dollars, where they matter most.

Developing a Baseline Understanding of Your Brand’s Role in Each Marketplace

We recommend starting your prioritization strategy with a baseline understanding of keyword performance on each marketplace. Using the table below as a guide, develop an index for each cell; if you don’t have mature enough data to support these calculations, find benchmarks for your industry from a reputable research outlet.

• Monthly Spend: On average, how much are you spending on each retailer by keyword or product?

• Share of Shelf: How much market share / SOV do you currently own for that keyword or product?

• Optimized PDPs: Are your PDPs optimized ON each retailer, FOR each retailer? Each retailer has different capabilities from Enhanced/A+ content, to hidden keywords, to title lengths and number of images allowed, etc.

• Query Demand: How much opportunity is there for a given keyword? Consider overlap rate, impression share, and other related provided data.

Prioritization by Product

In addition to prioritizing spend & optimizations across retailers, we also recommend developing a prioritization strategy for which products you promote via paid advertising. Not all products will perform consistently well on each retailer, so evaluating opportunities to test new products as well as analyze the incrementality of your paid spend by product will enable you to prioritize where to push spend to drive better profitability.

Things to consider when developing product prioritization frameworks

• Which products are your hero products?

• Which products have a strong organic revenue velocity?

• What products are most elastic?

• Do you have any products with both a low ROAS (ad revenue from ad spend) and a low tACOS (total revenue from ad spend), signaling an opportunity to test new products?

There are many ways to prioritize your time and money across marketplaces; the key is always having an eye towards profitability and incrementality of your ad dollars. Find where you have a right to win, and prioritize those areas first! If you have any questions or want to hear more about our approach, contact Rise.