Posted by
David Shim on March 4th, 2013 at 8:17 am
Showrooming is the practice of examining merchandise in a traditional brick and mortar retail store without purchasing it, but then shopping online to find a lower price for the same item. - Wikipedia
With smartphones becoming the default mobile device, the process of showrooming is simplified with apps like Amazon Price Check, RedLaser, etc... In response to this growing threat, Target and Best Buy have taken drastic steps to directly price match leading online retailers. At a macro level the threat to brick and mortar retailers is clear, what has widely been ignored is understanding who is doing the showrooming.
In the largest showrooming study to date, Placed identified where Amazon customers who indicated they had showroomed in the past, shopped in January 2013. This population was further segmented by Gender. The results were significant, finding Male Showroomers were 39% more likely to visit Best Buy, 24% more likely to visit Home Depot, and 23% more likely to visit Lowe's than the US population. For Female Showroomers the top three were completely different with Kohl's at 49%, PetSmart at 47%, and Bed Bath and Beyond at 46%.
These insights inform brick and mortar retailers on potential risks associated with showrooming and their customers. Retailers... Read more
Posted in Ad Networks, Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Research, Targeting, Web Analytics, Wireless | No Comments »
Posted by
David Shim on December 31st, 2012 at 10:49 am
Market share is a largely ignored performance metric for retailers, not because it isn’t valuable, but because it isn’t accessible. Typically market share metrics are sourced from quarterly reports where data is stale, limiting actionability.
The ability to measure market share in real-time will disrupt the way retailers determine the success of the marketing efforts. Today, retailers measure performance in various ways including return on ad spend (direct response), and in-store sales (branding, promotional). By measuring market share, retailers are able to take a macro view on their marketing efforts that expands beyond their brick and mortar walls.
Quantifying performance by market share allows retailers to look at the entire retail ecosystem, versus a siloed approach to marketing. By using market share as a key metric it allows retailers to optimize to gain share of wallet. Understanding market share allows marketers to build campaigns to capture the $1.44 spent at competitors for every $1 spent with them.
Placed recently released their 2012 Holiday Retail Insights providing a first glimpse into retail market share, which includes surprising volatility.
Wireless Carrier Retail Stores - Market Share
Verizon and AT&T wrestled for the top position in terms of wireless carrier store visits in the last six weeks of the holiday shopping... Read more
Tags: analytics, holiday, market research, market share, measurement, mobile, retail
Posted in Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Research, Web Analytics, Wireless | 1 Comment »
Posted by
David Shim on December 28th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Retail metrics during the holiday season are typically focused on aggregations like overall retail sales are down 0.7% year over year, or activity on Black Friday, Super Saturday, or Christmas Eve was above or below last years numbers. While this macro level of reporting is interesting, it is limiting in terms of competitive insights and actionablity.
Placed recently released its Holiday Shopping Insights providing in-store activity reporting down to the retailer. As part of this analysis, Placed looked at the busiest days for some of the largest retailers in the US including Walmart, Target, Toys 'R' Us, Macy's, Best Buy, and Kohl's.
This analysis highlights that a single days performance does not make or break a retailer's Christmas. Rather these insights highlight consumers' retail preferences are variable based on time of year. For example, Target's busiest day was Christmas Eve, while for Best Buy is was December 22nd. The ability to look past macro retail trends and dive into retailer level insights enables marketers to react in season to offline behaviors of consumers.
As consumers retail preferences change based on time to Christmas, marketers are able to leverage consumer behaviors to drive incremental sales. The ebbs and flows in terms of relative in-store visits were... Read more
Tags: analytics, location, mobile, retail, solomo
Posted in Emerging Platforms, Opinions, Research, Web Analytics, Wireless | No Comments »
Posted by
David Shim on September 22nd, 2012 at 10:32 am
Analyzing user data is standard practice for pretty much every website out there — large or small, consumer or B2B. In April 2012, Google announced that over 10m sites were using Google Analytics, and many more are using enterprise-focused solutions like Omniture, Coremetrics, and WebTrends.
The scale of adoption in web analytics highlights the direct benefits businesses see in measuring site activity — including key metrics like visitors, visits and page views, traffic source metrics like keywords and referring sites, as well as optimization metrics like conversion rates. And as companies have introduced services around mobile analytics, they’ve tried to create similar context for mobile measurement.
But while using similar metrics across web and mobile may feel more familiar for many businesses, it also discounts what makes mobile unique: location. Location data on the web is coarse, and limited to dimensions like country, state, and city — location analytics for mobile is different, in that it allows for a level of precision down to meters, and context down to place.
Inventory Availability Based on Location
Mobile location data, if used appropriately (and in connection with mobile analytics), can help drive revenue for both the publisher and the marketer by enabling mobile inventory to be sold against more granular, premium... Read more
Tags: geofencing, location, location based advertising, location based service, mobile, mobile analytics
Posted in Ad Networks, Ad Serving, Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Research, Targeting, Web Analytics, Websites, Wireless | No Comments »
Posted by
David Shim on September 17th, 2012 at 10:03 am
While there are a handful of companies close to realizing the potential of location-based targeting, as an overall industry there is a gap between perception and reality. Let’s use Jane as an example:
Jane walks by a Starbucks and receives a push notification for 10% off a drink order. Jane then goes into the Starbucks and purchases a grande latte. This is the perceived future of mobile advertising: to target a user in the real world to guide behavior. However, the reality of mobile ads looks a bit different today.
Perception: Jane walks by a Starbucks.
Reality: Jane walks within 100 meters of a Starbucks (length of a football field) and receives a notification of 10% off a drink order. Today’s location-based targeting is limited in the ability to precisely identify that Jane is walking by a Starbucks, rather the norm is to identify that Jane is within a few blocks of a Starbucks.
Perception: Jane receives a push notification for 10% off a drink order.
Reality: Jane needs to either (a) have opted in to receive push notifications from Starbucks or a Starbucks partner before walking by the store, or (b) be consuming mobile content that has the ability to target ads based on location... Read more
Posted in Ad Networks, Ad Serving, Emerging Platforms, Opinions, Research, Targeting, Web Analytics, Wireless | No Comments »
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