For example, if a shopper queries “Palmolive,” the brand’s products will likely appear in the SERP, but competitors like Dawn, Method or other challenger brands you might not have heard of will also show up. And as much as you’d like to believe that you’d land at the top of the fold for a search on retail media for your own brand name that you’ve trademarked and put millions of dollars behind, that’s not always the case.
The price of making that assumption can be costly in terms of lost market share and digital shelf space. So remember, all is fair and love and war … and search.
Keeping your search crown
So where does that leave you today as you get bombarded with offers of programmatic and streaming on retail media? Always test, learn, iterate—of course. But don’t ignore the core. Instead, use those fundamentals to help you evaluate the new offerings that people are trying to sell you.
First, a retailer’s website basics must be rock solid. Organized categories must make sense, be user-friendly, contain multiple product images and detailed product pages, be mobile-friendly and be externally search-friendly. If you Google your product, does one of the retailer’s pages with your product come up? If you search for your product on the retailer’s site (brand name or non-brand name), what’s the experience like?
If you are having trouble converting a shopper already on a retail site that is explicitly searching for your brand, how much harder do you think it will be to convince the shopper to leave an external site to click on that banner ad to go to a retailer, begin their research anew and then convert?
Let’s say the retailer has terrible onsite search capability and you want to bring shoppers to your products offsite. You could try narrowing the targeting and layering on first-party retailer data. But again, once the shopper is past that first-click experience and tries to perform an onsite search or click on another product, they may end up leaving due to the poor experience before ever converting. Repeat this tactic and you might even be filling your own retargeting pool with incorrect shoppers that you’ll end up trying to reengage later to no avail.
Do your housekeeping
We’re still living in a search-based world. Yes, we’re headed toward some really smart audience-based recommendations, not just previous purchase-based but far more sophisticated. These include basket-building and new-to-brand, which will help your brand move up the funnel and extend reach. As we move toward more consistently measurable, predictable and provable display, I recommend taking the following search-oriented housekeeping steps for your brand on retail media.
Non-brand onsite search evaluation: If you haven’t walked the floor of the digital retailer for your own brand recently, you should. Observe if the ads that show up alongside the organic products are a match, or if there are mismatches that look out of place.
Search your branded terms for relevancy and accuracy: Check on conquesting. Are there competitor brands bidding on your brand terms? While Amazon allows this, Walmart does not. Know the rules. There may also be personalized results based on your past shopping and search. So pull up an incognito window and note where the experience can be improved on SERP as well as individual product pages that are important to your brand.
