It’s clunky getting people to add something to their shopping cart from a display ad.
Ad tech company LoopMe launched Tuesday a shoppable in-app unit designed to streamline that process.
“The more you can reduce the number of clicks, the better it is for conversion,” said Par Vajihollahi, marketing manager at vitamins and supplements maker MegaFood, which is using the product.
LoopMe’s shoppable creative unit is served programmatically, and hooks directly into Amazon, Walmart, Target and Kroger through an API, so consumers can add a product to their cart directly from the ad, without having to search online. Advertisers can choose the platform they want to direct shoppers to based on their distribution relationships.
LoopMe identifies people interacting with the ad via its audience network of mobile IDs that covers 250 million consumers in the United States. LoopMe enriches mobile IDs with demographic and behavioral data from providers such as IRI, Oracle and Nielsen, as well as information it gleans from the device, to create a unique identifier.
“Because we have that unique position as a media provider but also an aggregator of consumer data, we’re able to get a good sense of the type of consumer that’s taken that action of adding to cart,” said Mel Bessaha, SVP for LoopMe in North America.
One of LoopMe’s value props, however, is its ability to provide more detailed information about shoppers engaging with its ad units and track them throughout their purchase journey. But LoopMe’s data set is underpinned by mobile IDs. Given the pace of regulation and browser clampdowns on data sharing, it remains to be seen how sustainable solutions like this will be in the future.
LoopMe is working toward a tool that leverages advertiser first-party data to underpin its ID, but mobile IDs are still the anchor of its ID graph for the time being, Bessaha said.
“A lot of brands are moving toward the CDP model and we’re on our way of developing something similar,” he said. “But for today, it is device ID specific.”
For now, leveraging LoopMe’s unique ID allows brands to look beyond short-term direct response metrics, like clicks and video views, to understand more about who is interacting with an ad and where the message falls in their overall purchase journey, Vajihollahi said.
For example, MegaFood was able to glean that because a lot of people were adding a product to their cart but not converting, they were interested in finding a physical retail location to make their purchase, rather than online. The company also learned that people were trying to click on ingredient photos to learn more about its products, which impacted its creative strategy for the next campaign.
“Most tools give straight up metrics like cost-per-click and impressions,” Vajihollahi said. “This gave us more guidelines for what we should do for users, and a lot of creative insight.”
In a campaign for its gummy and powder-based supplements, traffic to those product pages increased by 200% during the campaign. Shoppers stayed on the page between 1:48 minutes to 2:30 minutes engaging with the ad. MegaFood declined to break out sales data. The company will leverage the ad unit in another campaign scheduled to run in May.
“It’s big for users to be spending that much time just to read up about a product,” Vajihollahi said.
