Top tips for offsite retail media campaigns

Nectar360’s Digital Trading Platform empowers brands to connect with shoppers online across paid social, display, video and YouTube and measure success through closed-loop attribution.

Here are some top-tips to run successful offsite retail media campaigns that generate higher returns on ad spend.

Nectar360 audiences are powered by transactional data meaning you can create audiences based on previous purchase history. Using Nectar360 Audience Builder brands can create their own custom audiences via self-serve or through our Planning team on a managed-service basis. By using Nectar audiences you are minimizing wastage by reaching a granular audience of real shoppers sourced from our 1^st party data.

A successful audience strategy is dependent on your goal, a strategy for improving ROAS may include brand buyers who already purchase your product with the goal of retaining them, retention is key to ensure you don’t lose customers to competitors. Targeting brand buyers also improves your return-on-ad-spend as these customers have previously purchased therefore are more likely to do so again.

Targeting lapsed customers who previously purchased your products in the past but not recently will help you to regain lost customers and targeting competitors will help you increase your market share. Basket modelling is a powerful tool to acquire new customers who don’t yet buy your product but have similar buying habits to other customers that do.

A successful retail media campaign will utilise a combination of the above audience strategies which are all possible via Nectar360 Audience Builder.

The Digital Trading Team have put together guidelines on our DTP Help Pages that cover best practices for creatives across paid social and programmatic, as well as templates to help design teams build assets quickly.

Ensure you are using a variety of placements such as Feed, Reels and Stories for Meta campaigns and both mobile and desktop sized placements for programmatic as this can help you get more reach and lead to more engagements.

Using clear pack-shots and calling out promotions such as Nectar Prices or prize draws if applicable may also increase engagement and make the ad more memorable.

We recommend A/B testing creatives and optimising mid-flight to ensure budgets are aligned to ads with the highest return-on-ad-spend which can be done on both DTP self-serve and managed service campaigns.

Brands can use DTP Insights to measure the success of their campaigns by reporting on sales generated both in-store and online by Nectar customers exposed to their campaign.

When measuring for success plan ahead for which SKU’s (stock-keeping-units) you want to measure in your campaign. For new or challenger brands measuring your product range will empower you with more data to make smarter optimisation decisions, you’ll also benefit from a halo-effect whereby customers may consider the product promoted in your ad but convert on an alternative product from your range.

As well as reporting on sales, conversion rate and newly acquired customers which are a few metrics already included in standard reporting, you may also decide to purchase a sales uplift report or brand uplift report with N360 Analytics to understand your campaign performance in even greater detail.

Your campaign can be setup entirely self-serve on DTP or by our in-house Digital Trading Team.

We recommend running campaigns for a minimum of 6 weeks, this gives enough time for shoppers to engage with your campaign and complete their shop.

Pick a channel aligned with your goal, Social and Display drive better conversion rates whereas Video and YouTube are better tools for awareness.

Create efficiencies by reducing the number of ad sets and line items where possible, this will help avoid duplication across targeting strategies and make campaign management more effective.

We recommend linking your ad to product pages on Sainsburys.co.uk to increase online sales, custom Branded Shop experiences on Sainsburys.co.uk can also be built by our e-commerce team for a more memorable digital journey.

It’s important to monitor your campaigns regularly via DTP Insights, utilise conversion & media metrics reporting to ensure media spends pace evenly throughout the flight duration, as well as optimising audiences by realigning budgets during the campaign and give greater weighting to audiences and creatives driving the best conversion rates and return-on-ad-spend.

Pick a single KPI and ensure your optimisations are aligned with your goal. By optimising to cost-based metrics such as ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) you will have greater control over the performance of your campaign. If your goal is awareness or video engagement over sales then ensure your optimisations are aligned to that goal.

This concludes my top-tips for offsite retail media activations, for more guidance our DTP Help Pages cover everything from audience building, campaign setups, FAQ’s and a glossary of common retail media terms.