What Marketers Need to Know about Shopper Marketing Metrics
There’s no doubt that consumers are becoming more omnichannel in their shopping behavior, blurring the impact of digital and traditional marketing efforts. As these once distinct and separate marketing disciplines have more interdisciplinary responsibilities, the metrics and methods to measure campaigns are also moving closer together.
As a result, there is often a lack of clarity on what sits in shopper, brand, ecommerce and consumer promotions, in how goals and KPIs often overlap, and in the campaign measurement strategies that various marketers employ.
While some metrics and measurements can be used for various marketing disciplines, shopper marketing in particular focuses on driving mid- to low-funnel sales activity at a specific retailer, and must be measured as such. With marketing as a whole experiencing so many shifts, here are the fundamentals of campaign measurement for shopper marketers and how they differ from traditional marketers.
1. Focus on retailer-specific, mid- to low-funnel metrics
National brand advertising campaigns typically work on high-funnel functions, such as increasing brand equity and brand awareness. Consequently, brand marketers think about broader and more abstract metrics like sentiment, social media reach and share of voice.
On the other hand, shopper marketing is mid- to low-funnel marketing and meant to influence shoppers as close to the point of purchase as possible. As a result, shopper marketers think about more concrete and on-the-ground metrics like category share, average order value and return on ad spend. These metrics are all grounded in real dollar sales at a specific retailer.
Further, shopper metrics weave across both digital and in-store because in today’s omnichannel age, consumers no longer take linear paths to purchase. They often start their shopping journey in digital and move to in-store, or vice versa.
Here, shopper marketing tactics can often overlap with consumer promotions, whose objective is to find new customers or reward existing ones, whether online, in-store or both. Typically, price value is the most common consumer promotion, by using discounts or adding products for the current price. Similarly, coupons and sampling programs are often thought of as shopper tactics, but they may also fall under consumer promotions. However, the difference is in the strategy. When used as a method to drive real sales and influence consumer behavior at the point of purchase at a specific retailer, consumer promotions as part of a larger shopper campaign fall directly under shopper marketing.
Finally, shopper marketing and ecommerce marketing, once firmly siloed, have merged closer together. Ecommerce marketing’s goal is typically to drive high-funnel awareness and potentially mid- to low-funnel sales action for a brand toward a business that sells its products online. In some cases, there is no distinction between shopper and ecommerce. However, shopper still sits firmly in mid- to low-funnel sales activity at a specific retailer, while ecommerce also includes--and may actually shift to only encompass--high-level activity, such as impressions, reach and website traffic.
It’s clear that goals and KPIs often overlap for brand, shopper, ecommerce marketing and consumer promotions, increasing the challenge of these teams to measure their efforts independent of each other. Fundamentally, however, shopper marketing is always distinguished by retailer-specific and mid- to low-funnel influence.
2. Connecting marketing efforts to real sales
By nature, shopper marketing measurement relies on shopper purchases. Because shopper marketers are concerned with influencing shoppers at the point of purchase, their efforts are evaluated by measuring sales.
However, sales as a standalone metric isn’t as useful as taking into account the marketing efforts and spend that went into that result. So, many shopper marketing campaign metrics rely on a comparison between marketing spend and sales results. Metrics like return on ad spend, incremental sales, sales lift and customer acquisition cost all fall under this category of measuring sales against marketing efforts.
On the other hand, brand marketing and ecommerce teams often think of standalone metrics like impressions and reach, that don’t offer comparisons or context to spend. Further, these metrics measure consumer activity much higher in the sales funnel than shopper teams do.
3. Differing priority metrics within internal vs. external network
While national brand marketing campaigns often have KPIs that are decided upon internally by, say, the brand’s internal marketing team, digital team, agency, etc., shopper marketing campaigns have various KPIs that may differ internally and externally. Internally, it may be easier to align on success metrics since only the manufacturer needs to buy into the proposed campaign.
However, the most successful shopper campaigns ensure that there is full buy-in from the retailer and brand teams, which may include retail media groups, merchandising teams, off-platform shopper agencies and brand marketing. Having these various teams means that KPIs expand and become more complicated to align internally and externally.
While the shopper team may be concerned with customer acquisition cost and category share, the retailer may be concerned with category growth and customer retention rate. The success of the campaign depends on getting retailer buy-in and also ensuring that it simultaneously achieves shopper marketing objectives on the brand side, while providing value to the retailer’s customers.
The complexity surrounding shopper marketing, and more specifically, campaigns being executed with multiple objectives require shopper marketers to focus on bottom-line sales metrics. The black and white nature of these metrics seem to bring clarity to shopper marketing efforts; however, it's imperative that shopper teams identify clear objectives and KPIs upfront to ensure consistent measurement across tactics and ensure complete buy-in from key constituents.
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Meghan Howard is the VP of Sales here at Chicory, the contextual commerce advertising platform.
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