The results are in.
Oracle’s Moat Outcomes API, a product that attributes digital ad impressions to in-store product sales, announced its first DSP integration with StackAdapt on Thursday.
The product is specific for CPG and retail vertical clients, with Moat licensing data from retail membership and loyalty programs to connect those customers to online identity data.
Moat’s roots are as an ad verification tool to support real-time programmatic. That’s an important differentiator for the Moat Outcomes API, said Michael Shang, StackAdapt’s VP of partnerships and business solutions. Other retail attribution services, such as IRI and NCS, operate on a longer time frame, he said.
A CPG campaign running from January through March typically might get an in-store sales lift report in May, Shang said. But with Moat and its RTB-native product, campaigns only run for 10 days before an advertiser starts to see daily attribution and optimization data.
The media agency Vue Digital, a pilot ad partner for the Outcomes API, is looking for products that “transform our client conversations from hypothetical to tangible results,” said paid media manager Kelly Weber.
Focusing on outcomes is especially important if a brand has parallel campaigns running via walled garden platforms, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. These platform self-attribute sales with a black box model, which means the programmatic agencies don’t have visibility into the actual conversions.
The Outcomes API will help advertisers transition to campaigns graded by results rather than loose proxies, Weber said. Today, CPG-retail campaigns typically use engaged site visits – i.e., did someone visit a product purchase page or take another action on the brand’s site? – as an indicator of someone’s intention to buy. But that’s just a correlation, she said, not the actual result.
But the Moat Outcomes API isn’t necessarily the right choice for every CPG brand, Weber said.
A candy brand’s Halloween campaign that runs for a month, for example, may not be worth the added cost and complexity of optimization. Since the API does attribute based on individual-level connections as opposed to a general store sales lift metric, it requires a committed campaign that will run for months, or at least six weeks, to build up a statistically significant conversion data set and allow time for optimization.
Even so, it’s a valuable way to get small and medium-sized product brands to test and attribute based on store sales, which they haven’t been able to do in programmatic before, Weber said.
The big retailer media platforms – think Walmart Connect, Target Roundel and Kroger Precision Marketing – often have mandatory minimums or search rates that disqualify smaller or regional brands. But there are many brands that aren’t carried in each major chain that still want data-driven digital advertising.
And there’s a lot of potential there. Sales-based attribution is more than just a nice cherry on top of a campaign, Weber said. Once brands attribute conversions and can see how digital media leads to sales – as opposed to mere click-throughs – they invest more in ecommerce and digital media.
“When they see the outcomes data tied to campaigns, the brands start to explore and think harder about the next steps, such as shoppable landing pages, that are part of a broader shift in strategy,” she said.
