With grocery eCommerce growing fast, how do you improve the visibility of your products on the digital shelf?
The events of the past 18 months have prompted dramatic changes in shopper behaviour, a surge in online grocery among them. As consumer demands become increasingly difficult to predict, Stuart Campbell, Global Advertiser Solutions Manager, looks at the growing need for Brands to tap into Retailer data and inventory in order to maintain pace with those shifts.
Keeping track of shopper behaviours can be difficult even at the best of times, let alone during a period of unprecedented change. In the past year alone, the grocery industry has had to deal with everything from supply chain disruption and panic buying, through to fundamental shifts in what Customers want – with local shopping, home cooking, and value all rising in importance.
For consumer packaged goods (CPG) Brands, change of this kind can make advertising relevance much harder to achieve. With preferences in flux, and needs and behaviours changing quite literally overnight, Brands need to work harder than ever to ensure that the campaigns they’re creating are delivered to receptive audiences.
Retail Media offers a solution to that challenge. Giving Brands the ability to promote products across a wide range of Retailer-owned properties ranging from websites and apps through to Point-of-Sale and In-store Magazines, Retail Media makes it possible to reach out to high-intent shoppers at the point of purchase. Moreover, by tapping into Retailer loyalty and purchasing data, Brands can target highly specific audiences and maximise the relevance of their campaigns.
Relevant Sponsored Search – a new Retail Media opportunity available on tesco.com delivered by dunnhumby media, Tesco and CitrusAd – builds on those principles. Relevant Sponsored Search is an easy-to-use, self-service paid search platform that provides Brands with relevant advertising opportunities with Tesco – the UK’s largest online grocery Retailer1 with a 36% share of the market.
Relevant Sponsored Search – a new Retail Media opportunity available on tesco.com delivered by dunnhumby media, Tesco and CitrusAd.
Retailer-owned digital channels like the Tesco website have become increasingly important to Brands over the past year and a half. Online grocery sales have spiked in that time, providing CPGs with the ability to reach a bigger and more engaged audience than ever before. At Tesco in particular, online sales grew by 77% during its last financial year alone2.
Crucially, this growth in online looks set to be sustained. Even as the UK has begun to open back up, ecommerce-powered grocery has remained strong. dunnhumby’s own research3 shows that the share of online trips made in February this year was almost identical to that seen in May 2020, meaning Brands now have a considerable opportunity to address a huge number of shoppers across Retailer-owned channels.
95% of all search basket adds come from the first page of results, with 44% coming from the top two positions4.
This has a clear implication from a sales and marketing perspective, of course. And there is an equally important consideration to be made in terms of product discovery, as well.
With more people shopping online, Brands need to ensure that their products are just as visible on digital shelves as they would be in store. 95% of all search basket adds come from the first page of results, with 44% coming from the top two positions4. Visibility is vital not only to the promotion of new lines, but in staying front of mind with existing Customers, winning back lapsed ones, and acquiring new buyers, too.
This is where the challenge comes full circle. The opportunity is there for Brands to maximise the value of the online opportunity by enhancing the discoverability of their products – but to do that successfully, they need to ensure that the campaigns they run are relevant to the audiences that they reach.
Relevant Sponsored Search enables Brands and their agencies to bid for those critical top two positions in organic search results. It also taps directly into Tesco data in order to help advertisers find the most relevant audiences for their products. That means that you can improve ad performance and minimise wasted spend, while also ensuring that shoppers enjoy an uninterrupted Retail experience.
- 1 Kantar Worldpanel, 12 weeks ended 04/10/2020
- 2 Tesco Preliminary results 2020/21 – Tesco.com
- 3 dunnhumby Consumer Pulse Study Waves 3 (May 2020) and 6 (February 2021)
- 4 Tesco.com website January 1 – March 31 2021, only desktop visit data (excludes App)