This WTF guide, sponsored by Criteo, defines commerce audiences, explains how they are created and describes how advertisers use them to target shoppers at key moments
Connecting with online shoppers is a game of hide-and-seek for marketers. The buying stages — discovery, consideration, decision and purchase — remain intact, but rarely linear. Consumers will move backward and forward along purchase paths littered with abandoned shopping carts and product reviews. A shopper can pass through all the buying stages in seconds with a shoppable ad on social media or take a much slower journey on the open web across multiple locations and devices.
Even though e-commerce is a fast-moving business with fleeting marketing opportunities, advertisers typically employ traditional demographics and other static characteristics to target consumers. These don’t reveal what a shopper is doing or where they are on the purchase path. They also cause missed opportunities and wasted impressions when ads get served long after purchase.
Millions of online transactions occur each day and produce a lot of data. When viewed through the proper lens, those data points are organized into commerce audiences to predict the shopping behavior of today’s post-pandemic, tech-enabled, buy-anywhere consumers.
In this WTF explainer guide, Digiday and Criteo define commerce audiences — how they are created and the new marketing opportunities they present.
01
Cutting right to the chase, what are commerce audiences?
The best way to understand commerce audiences is to understand commerce data. Commerce data is any type of data signal generated by consumers as they discover, compare, browse and make purchase decisions.
Millions of online purchases are made every day and each one leaves a data trail that can wind through multiple locations across the open web, including retail sites, product pages, search engines, message boards, loyalty programs and more. Commerce data is the collection of all the browsing information and purchase behaviors associated with those customer journeys.
“Commerce has changed dramatically since the pandemic and the amount of data flowing into commerce has increased exponentially,” said Mike Balabanov, vice president agency development at Criteo. “Advances in AI allow us to make more sense of all the fragmented consumer signals and behavior.”
02
Is it safe to say that commerce data points are the building blocks of commerce audiences?
Yes. While commerce data may not always be structured, nor is it one-size-fits-all, by itself, it doesn’t help advertisers target their campaigns. Commerce audiences take shape when an advertiser’s marketing goals are applied to the data. Based on the goals, relevant data from three primary buckets is used to build commerce audiences: content, product and user attributes.
Content data helps determine interest and relevance. One example is a user landing on an online article about headphones. While an electronics manufacturer would be most interested in that data point, that visit (used in the context of other data points) could also reflect a consumer with a high interest in attending live music or subscribing to a streaming service. It could also reveal less apparent predispositions like travel or fitness.
Product data is an enormous and robust category. It includes the attributes of each SKU, which vary from one retailer to the next as each merchant chooses what product features to track. Product data also includes the purchase, search, stock information and browsing activity occurring throughout e-commerce sites.
Sticking with the same example, a consumer shopping for headphones visits an online retailer to search, browse, research and make a purchase. The actions and numerous product features associated with the headphones, such as availability, style, color and price, are all used to define a commerce audience.
The third category is user data, which includes qualities many marketers are familiar with such as geo, demographics and buying power. However, these attributions gain additional significance and reveal new insights when paired with shopping behaviors. By expanding on these generic characteristics, commerce audiences remove the common assumption that identity equals intent.
03
Now that I know how commerce audiences are built, how are they activated?
Because commerce audiences leverage shopper behavior, brands align the timing of their marketing to the stages of the buying journey. Commerce audiences predict consumers’ interests and actions as they move through product discovery, consideration and toward a purchase; so nimble marketers can customize campaigns to the different buying stages. Commerce audiences can also predict the products buyers are likely to engage with, even if they haven’t yet begun their buying journey. In this way, commerce audiences are more about matching products to people vs. matching people to products.
For example, a consumer electronics retailer selling a new gaming console may want to reach gamers and parents with children in the household. Using traditional targeting signals, that business may rely on demographic data to identify its target audience. However, with commerce audiences, it can identify the ideal audience using data generated by a combination of people actively browsing gaming consoles and other video game-related products as well as people browsing relevant publisher content.
Due to the convergence of sophisticated analytics, massive data sets and AI, marketers can reach consumers as they move throughout the purchase journey. AI finds correlations between users, products and buying patterns, and those similarities will identify shopping patterns on the open web with a high likelihood of converting.
“Data assets, partnerships and AI are working together to make sense of the data that’s always been there,” said Krushna Merchant, vice president of product at Criteo. “Commerce audiences are less about finding the signal in the noise and more about turning what was once considered noise into actionable signals.”
04
How does this differ from existing audience targeting methods?
The opportunity to target based on real-time shopping behavior wherever purchases are made is an important distinction for two reasons.
First, commerce audiences rely less on the shopper’s characteristics and more on what the shopper is doing. Building a strategy around ideal customer profiles or broad demographic data wastes impressions on consumers who have already completed the purchase or simply aren’t interested. Plus, demographic data does little to match a shopper’s mindset, motivations or preferences.
Second, the shopping journey is more fluid, where consumers discover a product and where they ultimately make a purchase can occur in entirely separate environments. This means the product and the activity around the product becomes increasingly more important. Rather than looking at activity in isolation, commerce audiences look at what happens with the product across the entire shopping journey, ultimately matching them to the right person.
“The modern buyer journey generates countless and seemingly disparate data points, and AI can analyze these at scale to uncover patterns, correlations and insights that would otherwise remain hidden,” said Merchant. “For instance, someone shopping for high-performance running shoes might also be interested in smart fitness trackers or marathon training gear. AI finds the correlations with seemingly unrelated users — like a casual walker — who, based on hidden patterns, might respond to the same ad. These commerce insights empower businesses to deliver smarter, more relevant experiences.”
05
What should advertisers be bringing to the table?
Very little is needed outside of clearly stated marketing or sales objectives. An advertiser’s first-party CRM data can help but commerce audiences can easily be created from the information found in a typical RFP, such as customer profile, product info, geographic targets, etc.
“The other piece of this is that a brand can use its first-party customer and sales data to enhance commerce data and find the most relevant commerce audiences for the products they sell,” said Balabanov. “First-party data is always highly recommended because it provides invaluable insights to help campaigns better target relevant audiences, optimize ad delivery and achieve those all-important outcomes.”
06
How do I find the right partner to help leverage commerce audiences?
Any tech company trying to build commerce audiences should demonstrate a few important capabilities and skills.
The number one capability is scale. The more data available, the more accurate the insights and the more refined those insights can be. Scaled data requires strong and reliable partnerships with retailers and publishers across a broad ecosystem of industries.
A tech partner in this space needs to be flexible by presenting many options for activating media based on the client’s goals. Plus, a campaign’s objectives will likely shift over time as the targeting grows more refined. Brands should find a partner able to customize the activations using different packaging, data signals and deal types that align with how they buy and measure media.
Partners that make privacy a priority and have the necessary data protection capabilities is also a key consideration. Advertisers should make sure that data is collected with consent, transparency and in a compliant manner.
“Traditional audience targeting fixates on who is buying and automatically assumes consumer profiles equates to intent,” said Merchant. “By working with partners that can properly organize commerce data, advertisers can flip the equation, and focus on why people are buying based on actual consumer actions and engagements with products.”
About Criteo
Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO) is the global commerce media company that enables marketers and media owners to drive better commerce outcomes. Its industry leading Commerce Media Platform connects thousands of marketers and media owners to deliver richer consumer experiences from product discovery to purchase. By powering trusted and impactful advertising, Criteo supports an open internet that encourages discovery, innovation, and choice. For more information, please visit www.criteo.com.
