4 Retail Media Trends for 2022

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that retail media is constantly evolving. More ways to target consumers, actionable insights to optimize your advertising spend, and ultimately grow sales. But what are key trends that advertisers can expect to see as we head into 2022?

Let’s dive in.

More Retailers, Better Advertising Solutions

The gold rush is on. Every retailer and last mile delivery service is rushing to grab their piece of the retail media pie. The US alone saw brands like Albertson’s, Lowe’s, and GoPuff enter the market last year. We don’t expect the trend to slow down as retailers across the world weaponize their powerful 1st party data based on real shopping behaviour. Changing privacy regulations disproportionately benefit them vs. the established digital players who’s reliance on 3rd party cookies have them losing the ability to drive and prove value.

However, it’s clear there is much to improve if they want to win brands limited media dollars. Retailers entering the market need to meet the sky high expectations of savvy advertisers who are used to the robust feature sets of Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Some are partnering with solutions like Criteo and Citrus Ads to power their solutions, while others go it alone like Instacart. We can expect to see significant improvement this year in functionality, measurability, and ease of use.

Ability to manage all these separate platforms has quickly become a serious issue. That’s why Perpetua continues to add support for additional retailer marketplaces as api access becomes available.

Login Overload

With the proliferation of retail media networks comes increased complexity for brands and agencies. Media buyers now have to log in to multiple platforms, learning each retailer’s unique product quirks. For example, they have to understand how Walmart’s 1st price auction differs from Amazon’s 2nd price auction and the implication that has on their bidding strategies.

Campaign reporting also becomes a challenge. Exporting and consolidating results from multiple retailers is a serious administrative headache. Perpetua’s new executive dashboard delivers a clear picture of your investment and sales across retailers, so that you can better optimize your budget allocations and deliver profitable growth for your brand or agency clients.

Widespread Adoption of Modern KPIs

In 2022, we also continue to see movement away from ACOS as the gold standard KPI for sponsored ads success. Many agree that an over-emphasis on profitability and ACOS comes at the expense of total sales and market share growth.

We know that paid investment accelerates an ASIN’s sales velocity, an important ranking factor in Amazon’s A9 algorithm. Thus paid investment contributes to higher organic rank and sales over time. Ideally organic sales increase over time and paid sales stay flat or drop as a percentage of total. This results in a more profitable flywheel for a particular ASIN over it’s lifetime.

The metric used to evaluate this interplay between paid investment and organic sales is Total ACOS (TACOS). This metric has been around for a few years now, but Amazon themselves have not formally adopted this metric yet. Thus advertisers are left piecing together reports from the ads console and seller/vendor central unless they partner with a software solution like Perpetua.

Beyond TACOS, many advertisers are also focusing on share of voice (SOV). By tracking and optimizing SOV at the query level, advertisers have a decent proxy for growing their share of market against competition. As with TACOS, these metrics are not available for either reporting or optimization natively in retailer platforms and thus 3rd party services are needed to fill the gap.

Finally, last fall Amazon launched an exciting new reporting suite called Brand Metrics. This tool provides advertisers with a number of new metrics to quantify the impact of their brand across all stages of the funnel. It also provides valuable category benchmarks, so advertisers can gauge how well their products are performing versus competitors and category leaders. We predict advertisers will more widely adopt these metrics in 2022, using them to justify increased investment in demand driving upper funnel activities.

Better Measurement of Brand Media’s Influence on Sales

Measuring direct ROI of top of funnel media like TV and OTT has always been a top pain point for brands and marketers. Traditionally brands have employed strategies such as econometric modelling, which can be both expensive and time consuming.

However, closed loop retailer ecosystems provide new opportunities to measure impact. With Amazon Marketing Cloud, advertisers can merge their own data sets with Amazon’s in a privacy safe data clean room. From there they can perform analytics to measure impact across the funnel on Amazon.com.

We predict much wider adoption of Amazon Marketing Cloud as a measurement tool in 2022. If you'd like to learn more, the team here at Perpetua have partnered with WARC to provide the very first AMC benchmark Report.

Conclusion

2022 will undoubtedly be an action packed year for brands, agencies, and advertisers in the retail media space. More options and improved capabilities promise greater opportunities to grow sales, but will you be able to manage the resulting complexity?

Perpetua can simplify and empower your retailer advertising management, giving you precious time back to focus on growing your business. Contact us at hello@perpetua.io to learn more.