MikMak, an ecommerce ad analytics company that began as an online add-to-cart specialist, is figuring out more and more how to get things in a physical shopping cart.
More than half of MikMak’s clients are brands carried in brick-and-mortar grocers, said founder and CEO Rachel Tipograph. “So one of the things that we needed to figure out is how to help our customers understand how digital impacts offline sales to justify their investments, as well as the existence of their jobs, to their CFO partners.”
To that end, on Tuesday MikMak announced a new in-store attribution and optimization partnership with Circana, the rebranded company that came out of the merger of IRI and NPD Group, two large retail market research and data sellers. The startup is also introducing shoppable recipe formats, so that, say, a recipe on a Kraft-owned website might be turned into a click-to-cart unit that sources items for the meal at a nearby store – as long as that store has an API that MikMak can plug into.
Food, beverage and alcohol companies sometimes have hundreds or thousands of recipes on their sites, or even just outright own and operate recipe and drink making sites, Tipograph said. “That’s where the consumer is living.”
The click-to-cart recipes are also useful because not every item on a Kraft recipe site’s suggestion list will be a Kraft-owned product. If a BBQ recipe pushes Kraft cheese and condiments, MikMak could fill in options for grilled chicken with another customer brand like Conagra.
But the big news is the Circana store data partnership, Tipograph said.
A store of data
Most big CPG and grocery store brands are already working with Circana for store-based sales measurement.
But brands typically use the data for media mix modeling to measure marketing at a high level, according to Tipograph. A couple times per year, a brand might leverage Circana data to determine which marketing channels and tactics are influencing store sales. What’s new with MikMak’s partnership, she said, is brands can now use the store-level data to “optimize their digital and social media in nearly real time based on offline sales.”
Understanding the halo effect of how online marketing affects in-store sales is a priority for marketers right now, said Surabhi Pokhriyal, chief digital officer of the CPG brand Church & Dwight, and a MikMak customer.
“There is a ton of digitally influenced sales that happen in the store, but the connection points are not as apparent to the naked eye,” Pokhriyal said.
For instance, she said that online product reviews and star ratings, which are intuitively an important factor in clinching online sales, have also become important in-store contributors.
Circan-ian rhythms
And the Circana data isn’t simply about attribution credit.
Figuring out how online marketing influences store sales can get directly to basic questions of product development and even R&D.
Ocean Spray and Kraft-owned Jell-O both had recent rebrands in which they changed “sugar-free” or “no sugar” options to “zero sugar,” among other redesigns. But the “zero sugar” description is becoming more popular now because that’s what people tend to type into online grocery search pages, whereas “sugar free” or “no sugar” perhaps worked better in TV commercials and on store shelves.
Consumer reviews and online feedback are helping brands identify what product details or descriptions are important to customers, and incorporating the feedback into their own product development, Pokhriyal said. “Over time,” she said, “things like how consumers search online for a product or category becomes how brands understand consumer preferences.”
