Automate or stagnate: embracing automation in Retail Media

Retail media has exploded in popularity over the last few years, but as more brands shift their ad dollars into retail media, these multiple networks are becoming increasingly complex to manage. Campaigns may encompass various networks, each with their own platforms, data, and ways of measuring performance. Manually managing all these moving parts is tedious, inefficient, and prevents brands from getting the most out of their retail media efforts.

Amazon’s push for automation

While the wider retail media industry has been gradually adopting more automated processes, Amazon has gone into overdrive with new automated offerings, forcing other retailers to scramble to keep up.

For example, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and Rapid Retail Analytics (RRA) give advertisers and sellers unprecedented access to rich, real-time data.

AMC offers deep advertising data analysis, enabling granular insights through customized queries. Its capacity for longitudinal studies reveals trends and campaign impact over time, unmanageable manually. 

Meanwhile, RRA delivers real-time metrics essential for quick decision-making, showcasing the importance of timely data in fast-paced retail. 

However, the depth and constant flow of data from these tools makes manual analysis or optimization extremely difficult. With hourly updates across thousands of ASINs and SKUs, harnessing these tools effectively requires automation. Rather than getting lost in fragmented Excel sheets or stalled in manual reporting, brands need automated pipelines to ingest the data, run queries, surface insights, and trigger actions. 

Only intelligent automation enables advertisers to stay on top of and respond to shifts in spend, rank, stock levels, and more. The scale and speed of inputs from AMC and RRA necessitate an automated approach to transform data into decisions.

That’s where automation comes in. By automating previously manual processes, brands and agencies can optimize retail media campaigns to unlock superior results and growth. There are several key areas where retail media automation is making an impact.

Automating campaign fundamentals

Many of the fundamental elements of retail media campaigns can now be automated:

Budgets: Automation allows brands to dynamically shift budgets across campaigns, networks, and time periods based on performance. Bigger budgets can automatically flow into high-ROAS campaigns, while lower performers see decreased funding.

Bids: Automated bid management tools leverage performance data and algorithms to optimize bids for maximum ROI. Bids can be adjusted in real-time based on conversion rates, sales, and other KPIs.

Keywords: Keyword performance can be tracked to identify high-value search terms. Tools can then expand on these themes to find new relevant keywords to target. Low-performing keywords are automatically culled.

Creatives: Leveraging performance data, automation can determine optimal creative formats, placements, messaging, etc. for each audience and campaign objective.

Automated optimization of these basic campaign elements allows brands to improve results at scale across all their retail media activity. But automation doesn’t stop there…

Taking reporting & data analysis to the next level

Automating reporting and data analysis enables brands to extract powerful insights from campaign performance. Three key capabilities stand out:

Anomaly detection :  By automatically monitoring KPIs, brands can rapidly identify unexpected changes and outliers in performance. This allows them to take quick action to capitalize on new opportunities or diagnose issues before they spiral out of control.

Trend analysis :  Uncovering patterns in performance data over time is easier with automated reporting. Brands can see how factors like seasonality, events, and other recurring themes impact their retail media efforts. These learnings allow for smarter planning of upcoming campaigns.

Predictive analysis :  Automated analytics can identify trends in historical data to forecast future outcomes. Brands can leverage these insights to optimize budgets, creatives, targeting, and other factors to achieve their desired objectives.

Together, these analytics provide actionable intelligence to enhance retail media effectiveness. And automation relieves marketers from manual number crunching so they can focus on strategy and optimization.

The future is automated

It’s clear that automation enables brands to manage retail media campaigns smarter and more efficiently. Retailers themselves are also recognising the need for automation as their advertising businesses grow and they feel more pressure from advertisers to use modern tools. And this is just the beginning…

As retail media matures and new technologies emerge, automation will become standard practice across the industry. Creative new partnership models between brands, agencies, and technology vendors will unlock even more opportunities to automate retail media execution and analysis.

The brands and agencies (an retailers!) that embrace automation now will gain a significant competitive advantage. They’ll be able to nimbly respond as retail media continues to evolve, while more manual operators will be left behind struggling to keep up.

They’ll make the most of retailers’ first-party shopper data and closed-loop measurement capabilities. And they’ll efficiently manage a complex ecosystem of networks and advertising channels. It promises big opportunities for savvy marketers ready to take advantage!