Retail Media

Retail Media allows you to present sponsored products, such as particular brands or manufacturers, in prominent positions on your website. These products will be seamlessly integrated into your regular search results and product listings, and the system grants you full control of where and how they are displayed.

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To ensure that the advertisements you are showing to your users are relevant, use of Retail Media is dependent on using Relewise's Search and Personalization engine.

At its core, Retail Media breaks down into three distinct parts: The Advertisers, the Campaigns, and the Locations.

Retail Media: Advertisers

At the top level, Retail Media is based on your Advertisers, and the campaigns you negotiate with them. Within Relewise, an advertiser can be defined by any type of datakey that you have integrated to your Relewise product entities, although the most common data is Brand or Category data.

Each Advertiser can have multiple campaigns associated with them, and you can gain a comprehensive view of the currently active, proposed, and archived campaigns you have run for each advertiser on each advertiser's page in your MyRelewise dashboard.

Retail Media: Campaigns

Advertising via Retail Media is done as Campaigns. Campaigns automatically filter by the products specified on the Advertiser level, but may be further filtered down through the Promotions filter. This allows you to specify a subset of advertiser products to be targeted by a particular campaign, such as highlighting products on sale, products in a certain series, etc.

Campaigns can be scheduled with both start and end time and date, to allow you to pre-configure campaigns for events like sales or holidays.

Each promotion may also be given a location specification, to define where on the site and where on the page the specific promotion may be shown. This allows a campaign to be broken up into parts, i.e. one promotion that advertises products on the search results page, and another that advertises a different list of products in a sidebar next to the product category display. The only limit is the design of your website; if you can build it, you can target it with your campaign locations.

A campaign is enabled through, and limited by, its budget. The interface allows you to specify the CPM (cost per mille, which means the cost per thousand ad views), as well as the limit of what you are willing to spend.

CPM also defines the priority of campaigns; in the case of multiple campaigns affecting the same searches, the campaign with the highest CPM will be favored.

Retail Media: Locations

Locations help define where your advertisements are shown. Each location is associated with one or more Placements, and each Placement with one or more Variations.

A Location is something like your Product Listing Page, your Search Results page, or similar. In other words, a page type.

A Placement is somewhere you define on your page, such as the Top of the page, or a Sidebar. These are defined in association with your particular design, according to where on the specific page you might wish to show advertisements.

A Variation is subordinate to the Placement, and helps define how many promotions should be showed for varying screen sizes. Variations allow you to specify the difference between, for instance, desktop displays, tablets, mobile phones etc.

Retail Media vs. Merchandising

Although similar, Retail Media differs from Merchandising by focusing on advertising within the site itself, while Merchandising deals with the strategic planning and presentation of products to enhance the shopping experience. Ideally, both Retail Media and Merchandising should be working together on your site, to enhance the experience of the user through a mix of personalized page content, targeted advertisement spots, and optimized, strategic marketing.

Selection Strategies

Retail Media uses a Relative-Promotion-Bid selection strategy to handle situations in which two campaigns are vying for the same spot in the same location/placement. To calculate which campaign is given preference, Relewise compares the individual CPM values of the campaigns, and engages in a calculation to give each campaign a relative weight.

By default, each new campaign is checked against the pre-existing ones for conflicts where it might be trying to promote the same product in the same location. Each of these conflicts is noted by the engine, and then run through the Relative-Promotion-Bid selection strategy to resolve the conflicts.

The Relative-Promotion-Bid strategy functions by calculating the relative weight of each individual bid to the sum of the total bids made for the product(s). This weighting is then converted to a percentage value, that is used to determine when a given campaign is given priority over the other.

Relative-Promotion-Bid Example

Campaign A has a CPM of 10,000.

Campaign B has a CPM of 2,000.

Campaign C has a CPM of 5,000.

All three are vying to put the same product in the same spot. The campaigns are compared against each other, and their relative weighting is calculated on the basis of their CPM:

Total CPM: 10,000 + 2,000 + 5,000 = 17,000

Campaign A is calculated: (10,000 / 17,000) *100 = 58.8%

Campaign B is calculated: (2,000 / 17000) *100 = 11.7%

Campaign C is calculated (5,000 / 17,000) * 100 = 29.4%

This calculation is done per product that is eligible to be promoted, i.e., the advertiser is allowed to promote it, and it matches the campaign's filters. This means that sometimes, one campaign may be taking up every placement when the page is loaded, while at other times the results may be mixed. Due to the probabilistic nature of the calculation, the averages will manifest over time.

The probability of which campaign to show is re-calculated behind the scenes in intervals of a few minutes. This means that refreshing the page several times in short order is likely to return the same results, but over time they will even out to reflect the relative bid value percentage of each campaign involved.