Guest Blog - Matt Bailey from PHG: Product level reporting – the missing piece of the puzzle?

Product level marketing is an accepted weapon in any advertiser armoury nowadays, and indeed is being taken seriously as a channel in its own right by most forward thinking brands and agencies. The availability of a comprehensive, robust and easily digestible product feed or API is considered a necessity by the majority and rightly so. It allows you to do some incredibly smart things across a range of online channels.

• PPC – Using product level marketing data allows you to power product specific ad copy and adapt your bidding strategy based on the product that the consumer is actually searching for resulting in a much more tailored experience.
• Display – Product feeds power the majority of retargeted display ads and also allow ‘traditional’ CPM bought display inventory to include dynamic ad copy.
• Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) – For ma a big missed opportunity for the majority of advertisers, especially with Google placing an increasing emphasis on this area. Quite simply, you cannot work with a CSE without a decent feed.
• Affiliates – As affiliates traverse all of the above channels and a lot more, a feed is clearly a vital component. As affiliates are using their own time and money you need to give them all the tools that you can. In addition, affiliates always have a choice to promote Brand A over Brand B and so making it as easy as possible for affiliates to promote you is one powerful way of increasing your chances in this area.

Tracking Sales Conversion Online

So, a quick demonstration on why product level marketing is vital. Nothing groundbreaking or new there, some people are doing it better than others and everything I’ve said above is becoming accepted wisdom.

The gap for me comes in what happens after this. People are spending considerable time, effort and money in enhancing the users experience in getting to the brands site and tailoring it to the most relevant products, but how much information is available as to what these filtered prospects have actually purchased?

This to me is the big disconnect in terms of knowledge that an agency or an e-commerce manager have. They understand that product level data must power the marketing strategy, but fail to tie that up with data that illustrates the actual purchase activity and how the two marry up. To close the loop here, you have to employ real time product level tracking technologies that allow you to track sales generated from multiple partners across multiple online channels. Which is where PHG tracking and reporting technology can help.

But what does having this increased insight mean in real terms?

• Greater visibility into actual business performance and granular ROI
• Assess what the best payment model for different channels is and whether specific activity is costing in
• Optimise activity across channels based on the ability to make marketing decisions based on real data
• Increase transparency with partners by feeding back to them what has actually worked and what hasn’t

If we break down the specific channel s that I highlighted above and take them as an example of how product level reporting could benefit them, then we see how important this is in practical terms and how it could make a significant difference to the way that you spend your marketing budget.

PPC

• Find out what people actually buy when they click on particular keywords.
• How would it affect bid strategy and ad copy if you knew this?
• What landing page do you send consumers to if you know they’re not likely to buy the product that they are searching for?

Display

• If you know that certain products are attention grabbers but are rarely purchased, how does this affect your display messaging?
• If you’re carrying out retargeting activity on a CPC, do all products return a positive ROI and therefore are there some that you should omit?
• Does this data power an increasing move towards display activity being carried out on a performance basis?

CSE's

• You generally pay on a CPC but measure an effective CPA. Do all products cost in on this basis?
• If not, should you restrict the range of products that you pass to these sites?

Affiliates

• Affiliates take all the risks and so it’s about empowering them to optimise their own activity
• Allows you to become more granular in how you pay out, pay affiliates based on your actual margins and business objectives.

So to summarise, hopefully I have demonstrated in this article why it is vital to understand not only what you’re adding into the marketing mix, but also what you’re getting out of it. It may be a marketing cliché now, but data is the new oil. My view is that brands and agencies are missing a trick by not having access to this product level reporting.

Online marketing is converging and it’s not simple enough to segment the activity by silos; search, display, social, email and affiliate now all overlap. By understanding the performance of your media irrespective of channel you are able to optimise the activity to ensure that your marketing budget is being used in the most efficient manner possible.

Matt Bailey is Commercial Director at Performance Horizon Group. PHG are specialists in tracking conversions driven from partners across multiple digital channels in real time. Their proprietary API allows them to query product feeds, at the point of conversion, to pull back comprehensive product level reporting. This allows brands to analyse and optimise activity on a never seen before granular level. PHG provide a comprehensive pivot based analytical reporting dashboard called ExactView.