Sam’s Club pioneers new search ad attribution feature
Sam’s Club’s retail media network is among the first to offer a new advertising data analysis capability.
The warehouse club retailer, a banner of Walmart Inc., is now enabling advertisers participating in its Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network to attribute in-store purchases to their search ads.
How it works
MAP collects real-time, first-party omnichannel data on customer transactions, including in-store, in-app and online. As a result, Sam’s Club says MAP delivers accurate transaction data, without extrapolation or panel estimates. This gives advertisers the ability to see exactly what revenue is generated by which ads, including search and sponsored products campaigns.
For Sam’s Club MAP advertisers, the retailer reports that overall return on ad spend (ROAS) has increased an average of nearly 30% since adding in-store sales to the attribution mix.
Sam’s Club has been developing new features for MAP this year. In February, the retailer began making real-time, intelligently retargeted display advertising available across tens of thousands of sites on the open web through MAP.
This new offering, provided in partnership with The Trade Desk and LiveRamp (RAMP), leverages first-party member data, advertiser data and artificial intelligence (AI)-based, real-time behavioral insights from Sam’s Club.
Now, in addition to serving personalized ads in real time to Sam’s Club shoppers who have expressed interest in a product but have not yet made a purchase, MAP can stop serving ads to customers, even when they are not on Sam’s Club properties, once they make a related purchase.
[Read more: Sam’s Club optimizes retargeting on ad platform]
"Sam's Club MAP is opening up a new era of transparency and efficiency in advertising," said Lex Josephs, VP and GM of Sam's Club Member Access Platform. "Now, because of our unique knowledge of our members, we’re able to offer true closed-loop attribution for both online and offline sales. This gives advertisers unmatched visibility into the results of their search and sponsored product campaigns at a time when they need to make fewer resources go further."
“There’s a huge group of our members who see a search ad online or on their phone when shopping but purchase the product in-club. Previously, it was not possible for our advertisers to connect the in-club purchase to their online ads to know what drove sales,” said Tim Simmons, senior VP and chief product officer, Sam’s Club. “With our new attribution model, advertisers can understand what’s motivating purchases across all channels accurately, especially for search ads.”
In-store attribution is available now for all Sam’s Club advertisers who have live sponsored products campaigns.
Bentonville, Ark.-based Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart Inc., operates nearly 600 stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.