The CMO Challenge: Connecting Online Digital Ad Exposure to Offline Consumer Purchases
With mobile and brick-and-mortar channels converging into an omnichannel shopping reality, tracking performance as it relates to digital ad attribution and audience targeting has become more challenging for merchant advertisers who want to know how digital ad spend is driving transactions at point-of-sale.
This challenge for merchants is exacerbated by the fact that omnichannel transactions will only continue to grow, as indicated by a 2015 Mercator Advisory Group study, “Analytics: Shaping the Right Customer Experience,” which found half of smartphone owners have used their mobile device to comparison shop online before buying in a physical store. The same study also noted that seventy-six percent of those who have used their mobile phone to shop have done so while shopping in-store.
Knowing this sentiment, digital publishers and advertisers are under immense pressure to measure ROI on “clicks to bricks.” After all, digital ad-spend represents thirty percent of advertising expenditure but less than ten percent of purchases are online.
“The omnichannel reality is here and proliferation of connected devices has made the shopping journey even more complex with multiple online and offline marketing touchpoints. The race is on to close the gap between online clicks and offline purchases,” said Arvind Ronta, Director of Commerce, Security and Data Products at Discover. “Transaction data is seen as the last mile for online to offline attribution. However, the transaction data is not clean and organized for attribution use-cases, and poses a challenge to confidently link transactions to merchant brands.”
Discover launched its Merchant Data Platform last year, which builds off its unique Network infrastructure and closed-loop assets to create rich data-sets and analytics for better attribution and targeting. The Merchant Data Platform provides access to a clean, organized, and accurate database of Discover merchant brands, locations, and acceptance capabilities.
“We created the Discover Merchant Data Platform to address gaps in transaction data, specifically around identification of merchant brands, to support our proprietary issuer,” added Ronta. “Today, Merchant Data Platform enables effective targeting and qualification for Discover Deals offers and Cashback Bonus rewards. Our merchant partners benefit from better targeting and redemption insights, which ultimately drives better marketing decisions. We have been on this journey for more than two years and continue to expand this data utility for Network partners to deliver superior customer interactions.”
The Discover Merchant Data Platform is valuable to many constituents in the payments, advertising and retail industries, among others needing robust merchant data to enable accurate reporting, as well as supporting capabilities such as localized offers or restricted open loop access to drive personalized experiences.
For more information on the Discover Merchant Data Platform program and how it can drive better attribution as it relates to spend, please contact [email protected].