What do your consumers really want? It’s often something different from what they searched for, whether they realize it or not. Shoppers searching for pants often want shirts and shoes, too. Brands such as Amazon built an entire empire around the notion that people who want one book probably also want five more and now order everything from jewelry to garden equipment and groceries to avoid having to venture from store to store themselves.
Dynamic creative ads were built on this concept. They catch shoppers’ attention and lead them to where they can buy the product or service that caught their eye and spend time browsing related products, too. In short, successful dynamic ads create the journey to final purchase. Here’s how it works:
How Ad Content Should Create Consumer Needs
Personalization is the name of the game, and good ads bring consumers into your store—whether online or in person—by focusing on certain parameters like location, weather, time-of-day, and more. Your local car dealership, for example, knows that a certain make and model is popular in your area of the country among women between the ages of 25 and 35. The dealership can utilize that data and to create dynamic ads that scale to bring prospective buyers into the showroom.
In our scenario, the role of the creative is to start the purchase—not finish it. You spark interest by using a number of different product shots, feed data (parameters described in our car dealership example), and a dynamic template that can include copy options, different product placement, and various price ranges. The end result depends on the user who sees the dealership’s ad: the car could be red or black or white and appear outside on a beach, parked in a driveway, or driving down a road that might seem familiar for this particular geographic area. What the buyer sees in dependent, in large part, on how they interact with other car ads or adjacent products and the way they move around the internet in general
It’s not enough to recommend top sellers and popular products. Consumers expect personalized ads and recommendations. Retailers have struggled for some time to confidently deliver (personalized ads), but in the end, it's your job to give them what they want.
The Right Way to Evaluate Consumer Behavior
Does it make sense to evaluate consumer behavior on-site and ignore their interaction with ads, even dynamic ones?
The most thoughtful retail media advertisers evaluate both.
First, you’ll have to dissect the makeup of the ads that garner the most clicks; which image(s) were used, what keywords were incorporated in the corresponding copy, list prices if applicable, and more. By analyzing how consumers respond to your ads, you gain insight into what brought them into your store and can start understanding their buying decisions.
Advertising loss leaders are a time-honored way to get people into the store and put that all-important first item in their cart. Then, when you offer additional products customers either want, need, or use already, they’re more apt to buy, even if prices are close to or at market-rate. You increase the number of items sold and average order value at the same time.
Next, track your shoppers’ footsteps through your website or devise a follow-up funnel after they’ve visited your location to determine how they interact with your brand. Did they ultimately make a purchase? How much was it, what did they buy, and does it correspond with the ad that landed them in your store? Collecting data better informs your ad creative moving forward for even more refined individual experiences.
Turning consumers into customers
Dynamic creative drives consumer loyalty by delivering the right message at the right time based on the parameters you put in place. If the weather is hot where your target audience lives or where they want to go, you can serve them ads for air conditioners or travel to tropical locales, respectively. The same concept applies to retail.
In fact, a report from McKinsey estimates dynamic ads—what they term commerce media—will be a $100 billion industry by 2026 in large part because of the ability to match consumer buying habits with specific product SKUs. The need to test ad creative is almost certainly never going to go by the wayside to determine what resonates most with shoppers. Remember, potential buyers expect to see ads that appear tailor-made for them, so offer creative SKU recommendations that increase the likelihood of the consumer becoming a customer.
Are you putting these principles to work in a solution that’s constantly experimenting to build targeted recommendations? RevJet offers an innovative, comprehensive solution that makes dynamic creative ad personalization seamless and easy. Want to learn more? Contact us today.
