It’s “a Rolodex of everything that you could buy from a conversion standpoint, when it came to tactics, that triggered an online sale or an offline sale,” Owen told Adweek.
Efficiencies between 12% and 15%
The new tool goes further than ShopSmart because it takes retailers’ historical spend, KPIs and budgets into account to automate the investment process. It optimizes media investments with particular retailers based on what’s working.
Previously, UM relied on manual calculations to make these kinds of investment decisions. “Like, it was in Excel,” Owens said. “It was really time consuming.”
One of Shoptimizer’s key benefits is that it speeds up the retail media investment process because it’s integrated with retailers’ merchandise data.
Speedier processes wind up saving marketers money on service costs. Plus, it ensures clients spend media investments more efficiently across channels that actually drive results. Before UM built Shoptimizer, the agency might wait as long as eight weeks after launching a campaign before receiving meaningful performance reports.
“It’s not just understanding the unit sales and the dollar sales at that retailer. It’s how much the media is driving those sales,” Owen said.
In practice, it means that if a client buys media from Target, UM media planners can view the client’s Target investments within Shoptimizer. The platform might reveal that search is performing better than a particular in-store activation. With eyes on such relatively granular data, media buyers can shift investments based on what’s working in any given time period and pull money out of ineffective activations.
The tool gives media buyers better insight into metrics and data, although the level of insight still varies by retail partner. Some retailers give UM performance data weekly, some daily and some still take longer. “This is constantly evolving, and we’re constantly updating the tool itself, so it varies,” Owens admitted.
UM’s commerce team began planning Shoptimizer roughly two years ago, taking about eight months to build the tool, including its lengthy taxonomy. It’s now launching after a year-long beta phase.
