The preliminary research you need to do falls into two buckets: pretty easy and not so easy. Start simple—you’ll need to take inventory on what first-party data your brand has, what the retailer has, how they gather it, and what has been made available in the self-service platform. Not all the information is going to be accessible in the way you might imagine it. For example, some data sets are likely too small (such as paid subscription programs like Walmart+ members) or purchasers during a short time period.
The complexity ramps up when it comes to assessing whether you need additional tools, such as audience research or shopper marketing research like Circana (formerly IRI) or SimilarWeb, and whether you need specialists in-house or assistance from a research tool that can dig through those platforms and know what to look for based on your goals.
It can also be a challenge figuring out how to reach the precise type of shopper you’re looking for via a retailer. In fact, you’ll need to assess whether this is the right retailer to find your ideal audience at all.
Step 2: Planning the campaign
Now that your research has given you the answers you need to start planning, you’ll want to assess the retailer’s audience segments to see what is actually available to target.
If the retailer has a specific partnership, like Walmart and The Trade Desk, it simplifies the process of where you’ll activate your campaign. You’ll be looking in The Trade Desk to figure out what is available from Walmart in terms third-party audiences and segments you can add to extend reach (but also at lower CPMs) to put together that campaign, whereas retailers like Target and Kroger allow you to choose the DSP of your choice for activation. This means you’ll need to determine whether to use The Trade Desk, Xandr, DV360, Yahoo or another vendor—which is another decision tree to climb.
Part of your decision will be predicated on rates and access. If you already committed to a certain DSP, that’s likely the route you will go. That usually means you have the potential to win negotiated rates or can build up media spend to get to a large enough book of business to negotiate rates. If you’re working with an agency, they often already have this rate negotiation baked in due to their scale, so be sure to check out what each DSP’s rates are before making your decision.
