Customer-Centric Sponsored Products Gain Traction

A huge traffic increase to e-commerce sites in 2020 means greater opportunity for retailers to add an additional revenue stream. CitrusAd and dunnhumby have teamed up to launch what they’re calling the “world’s first customer-centric sponsored products platform for retailers and brands.” The new platform leverages historical data from a customer’s purchasing behavior to feature highly relevant products.

The data can come from a customer’s offline and online purchases, and the sponsored products show up as non-interruptive native ads. CPG brands can create auction-based campaigns that use programmatic bidding to secure ad slots based on predetermined parameters such as budget, keywords and categories.

As part of the sponsored products platform, two products are currently available:

Sponsored search uses keyword matching to promote relevant goods at the top of a customer’s product feed when they look for an associated item.

Sponsored recommenders enables paid placements to be surfaced within a specific area of a retailer’s website, like categories, aisles and the checkout.

Related item (cross category) and similar item (same category) product page listings help to encourage cross-sell and upsell respectively.

“The beauty of dunnhumby’s Sponsored Products is that it allows retailers and brands to promote products to customers in a way that is ultimately additive to the quality of their shopping experience,” said Jérôme Cochet, dunnhumby media managing director. “By utilizing customer behavior data from online and in-store transactions, we’re able to score them against multiple objectives for every product a retailer sells, such as retention and acquisition. This ensures a cohesive link between the ads they see and the products they’re likely to buy.”

Campaigns delivered through dunnhumby’s sponsored products are managed through an online portal, giving users the choice of both self-service and assisted bookings. Advertisers can select from a range of predetermined and customizable criteria to refine their strategy, and in-flight reporting allows them to gauge and tweak the effectiveness of campaigns in real time.

“This partnership delivers a world-leading sponsored products offering, further enhancing our CitrusAd retail media platform with dunnhumby’s world-class customer data science capabilities,” said CitrusAd CEO Brad Moran. “Along with real- time reporting and a plethora of highly valuable ad opportunities for retailers, the partnership presents advertisers with an incredibly powerful proposition taking them from data-driven targeting to the timely, context-sensitive delivery of non-interruptive, native ads. It’s a combination that we believe has huge potential for businesses that want to drive the maximum revenue from their retail media programs without compromising their personalization efforts and customer-first approach.”