An online store or a marketplace has something many sites do not: people who arrive intending to buy, and brands or sellers who want to appear in front of them. Selling that visibility is called retail media.
It is what the big commerce platforms have done for years. The difference is that a mid-sized store rarely has the technology to do it.
How a sponsored listing works
A sponsored listing is a featured product, paid for by whoever sells it, in a place in the store where shoppers are already looking:
- on the home page;
- in search results;
- on a category page;
- on a product page.
The seller pays for the placement. The store earns. The shopper sees a product relevant to what they are looking for.
What has to be right
Relevance, not just the bid. If placement always goes to whoever pays most, the store fills up with products nobody wants and people stop trusting what is featured. On adPluga, the ad that shows is chosen by the expected value of each display, which combines the bid with the likelihood that the person clicks or buys.
Crediting the sale to the right seller. The seller wants to know whether the placement sold. Each sponsored listing carries a signed identifier and, when the purchase happens in your store, a conversion pixel or a notice from your checkout ties the sale to the right campaign. That makes it possible to charge per sale, not only per view.
Control over what shows. Every creative goes through moderation before it shows, and the store decides which spaces exist and where.
What you need to start
- Define the spaces in the store: home page, search, category, product.
- Invite sellers and brands to create campaigns for those spaces.
- Connect the purchase event, by pixel or from checkout, so sales are credited.
- Follow the results per campaign: views, clicks, conversions and revenue.
Why you do not start from zero
The hard part of an ad network is finding audience and advertisers at the same time. In a store it is not needed: the shoppers are already there and the sellers already sell there. What is missing is the engine that decides what to show, measures and settles, and that is what adPluga brings.
If you run a store or a marketplace, see the for merchants page or talk to us so we can show you how it would work with your catalogue.