Retail Rocket launches the Sponsored Products: a new personalization algorithm to increase the revenue of multi-brand online stores

This AI tool boosts the key metrics of both the brands and the marketplaces, creating a unique shopping experience for each customer

The wide range of product assortment in multi-brand online stores and marketplaces can hinder the visitor’s search and purchase decision, directly impacting the abandonment rate. To avoid that, to streamline the purchase process is one of the biggest challenges in the e-commerce sector, creating a unique shopping experience for each user. Here is where this new algorithm plays an essential role in the customer journey’s hyper-personalization.

For the development of this algorithm, the Retail Rocket team was inspired by the world’s largest online store, Amazon, and the actual way of boosting its revenue. More than half of its revenue comes from Sponsored Promotions. 

The Sponsored products is a tool for native promotion on the virtual shelves of the online stores. It allows brands in agreement with the marketplace to design an on-site campaign for certain items during a specific period. The goal is to display a brand’s product selection in the most visible store’s place to the relevant audience. 

It is not a simple brand recommendation or advertising, but e-commerce personalization. By implementing blocks, banners, or a combination of both, the sponsored products occupy a privileged position in the online shop of users that are interested in purchasing them. Our algorithm allows us to identify this audience based on the behavior of each visitor in real-time.

Why would brands want to promote their products in the online store?

According to a report by IBM‘s U.S. Retail Index, the Covid-19 pandemic has boosted the shift to e-commerce by approximately 5 years, with a 20% increase estimated. Due to this continuous growth of e-commerce, brands are also increasing their share of online sales by using all the available tools.

A personalization campaign with benefits for the brand, the online store, and the customer

The Sponsored Products algorithm has direct benefits for both the brands and online stores, as well as for the visitors. The fact of showing the relevant products to the relevant target audience based on real-time predictive analytics simplifies the customer’s purchase journey. In this way, they will easily find what they are looking for, and consequently, the conversion rate and, the revenue of the brand and the online store will increase.

All Sponsored Products campaigns include an A / B test, which will provide the online store with a detailed report to determine its effectiveness. With this, they will, in turn, store users’ behavior data; high-value information for carrying out a comprehensive personalization across all channels.

Retail Rocket clients, such as Lego and Procter & Gamble, have already conducted exceptionally successful campaigns with sponsored products within online stores. The increase of key metrics with the implementation shows its effectiveness and high profitability.

 

The pilot project to promote Lego in an online toy store showed excellent results. Compared with a control group that was not displayed recommendation blocks with these items, the effects of including sponsored products were the following:

• 45% of visitors were more likely to visit LEGO product pages;
• The carts with at least one LEGO product was 69% higher than usual;
• The orders with at least one LEGO product increased by 28%;
• In the ad segment, by 71% more LEGO items were purchased;
• The average order value increased by 44%.

 

If you also want to test its effectiveness, contact Retail Rocket. Our team will take care of everything: from designing the campaign, always respecting the brand image, to cooperating directly with the online store for its integration.