Commerce Accelerated - Retail News & More

Hello! This week's newsletter will focus on: the latest Retailer News, New Pacvue Product News, AI, Upcoming events, & of course my recommended Podcast(s) of the week!

??Retailer News - What's ??

Amazon

Amazon Rapid Retail Analytics API

Amazon introduced the Rapid Retail Analytics API in late June providing vendors and sellers access to hourly retail engagement and conversion data such as:

• Conversions: ordered units, ordered revenue, and ASIN Sales
• Engagement: Glance views/Detail Page Views, Asin traffic
• Inventory: Highly available units

??Impact:?Hourly retail data allows vendors and sellers to optimize their business in real time, provide insights to advertising teams, and forecast more accurately. Between this and Amazon stream data, Amazon is moving to unlock more real time data, continuing to allow teams to optimize smarter and faster.

??Pro tip: If you're not following Jeffrey Cohen & his #amazon newsletter yet for all the latest Amazon news - do that now! Jeff talks about all the new June updates here such as Bulksheets updates, Rapid Retail Analytics, TOS & more

Walmart

WALMART NTB for All Campaign Types

NTB (New to Brand) Sales: Customers who have not purchased your brand at Walmart in the prior 12 months.

• New to Brand originally became available for Sponsored Brand and Video campaigns and is now included in measurement for Sponsored Product campaigns.?

??Impact:?Sales keep your business stable but growing your customer base and selling your products to consumers who have not previously purchased your brand, grows your business and ensures longevity. This is a great measure of success of media when your goal is to grow within the category.

Instacart

INSTACART Display Management via API?

Instacart recently announced new shoppable video & display products to drive discovery & purchase. Instacart Display campaigns can now be fully managed via Pacvue following API updates.?

• ?Instacart display campaign reporting has been flowing through the API for some time but now users can launch and manage their display campaigns via Pacvue moving forward.?
• You can read more about Pacvue's expanded partnership here

??Impact: This allows for a more streamlined advertising experience, teams can now deploy, manage, and report out on search & display campaigns in unison. This will allow for strategy, optimization, and reporting synergies as Instacart provides linear and last touch attribution.?

Criteo

CRITEO Released Keyword Targeting?

Criteo RMP released specific keyword targeting (which is now also manageable in Pacvue)

• Auto Keywords: Automatically add keywords that Criteo’s Keyword Model deems most relevant to the products in that line item.
• Manual Keywords: Users can add additional keywords to line-items on top of the auto keywords and adjust the bids to these keywords based on performance?

??Impact:?Targeting is no longer completely automated based on a products relevancy and category. Users can now be very intentional about what keywords they want to bid on and optimize smarter based on keyword specific performance. This is a big win for advertisers and will improve performance on Criteo.?

????? Pacvue Product Roadmap News?

Unlocking the full potential of eCommerce requires staying ahead of the curve and making data-driven decisions to drive sales and success. While retailers are busy launching new features, we're busy integrating them & identifying how we can continuously add more value so we can save time & improve performance. If anything piques your interest, we'd be happy to show you in more detail (and we always like to geek out on ecommerce) - contact us here

Subscribe and Save: Vendors can opt-in to Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program, which offers discounts ranging from 5-15% to consumers if they enroll. But, Amazon doesn't offer a programmatic way to track, report and manage subscription volume, number of subscriptions, and how it influences media performance tracking. With Pacvue's Subscribe and Save data integration, you will gain access to precise ASIN-level product metrics, track volumes, and gauge media impact that will help boost sales and foster customer loyalty.??

?Periscope: Every week, Sales Managers at brands must report and explain why their business is up or down each week, month, and quarter. This is typically a pretty manual process downloading and aggregating reports - spending more time in spreadsheets and not enough time left for strategy. This Pacvue product is solving this problem by providing the reporting needed and constantly monitoring and tagging areas of opportunity so Sales Managers are enabled to take control of commerce performance without digging through tedious amounts of data.

AMC Audiences: Running campaigns using AMC data is complex and often requires technical experts with SQL knowledge within organizations to simply create customized audiences based on specific metrics and indicators. With Pacvue's pre-built and customizable AMC Audiences tailored to your campaign goals, your team can enable precise audience targeting without technical knowledge so you can achieve improved ad performance with a few simple clicks.

• Just a few examples of pre-set audience templates: Cart Abandoners, Promotion Purchasers, & SP Keyword searchers who did not purchase

? #gamechanger

Amazon has created an Amazon Marketing Cloud Certification - your teams can sign up here. (This Certification was designed for analytics practitioners than can write SQL-based queries. Prior SQL is recommended). If you're an agency - I highly recommend having folks on your team certified as it will give you a good, competitive edge!

?? AI Spotlight

There continues to be a lot of ??buzz about leveraging #chatgpt to automate various activities in our space. I asked Bradley Sutton what he's seeing / hearing and he said "there's always a lot of buzz, but I don't find many people actually using it too much (except for Helium10's Listing Builder of course ??)".

But - it's important to keep up with the latest news & tools.

2 AI Podcasts to listen to up your AI knowledge & apply in our space:

Serious Sellers Podcast - AI Tools Amazon Sellers Should be Using - Steve Simonson talks about AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other tools sellers should be using to revolutionize their business.

CPG Guys Generative AI in CPG with Applied Intelligence's Imteaz Ahamed - Imteaz breaks it down and talks from the vantage point of enterprise brands. Imteaz also has launched his own newsletter & podcast focused on AI.

???? Upcoming Industry Events -- See you there!?

Here are some upcoming eCommerce events Pacvue will be at if you want to connect with like-minded people in the industry!?

• 7/26-7/28 Commerce Week??
• 8/24 – 8/26 Walmart Conference?
• 9/13 IAB Connected Commerce Summit?
• 9/18 – 9/21 GroceryShop?
• 9/26 – 9/27: Programmatic I/O NYC?
• 10/24 - 10/26 Amazon Unboxed

??? Podcast of The Week ?

?I love podcasts - to me, they are the new business book with the most up to date and actionable information. Here are my recommendations for you to listen to this week:?

Congratulations??to The CPG Guys for their 300th episode! I highly recommend listening to this special episode Retail Ad Tech Innovation with KPM’s SVP Cara Pratt.?

And if you want to add to your eCommerce podcast library, here is a list Storyly has curated for you to add to your rotation.

That's it for this week! Stay tuned for Prime Day & Q2 Earnings results!

About the author: Melissa Burdick , a seasoned omnichannel growth expert and retail industry thought leader, is the co-founder and president of Pacvue , a commerce acceleration company. Burdick helps brands and sellers start, run and scale their business across shopping destinations including Amazon, Walmart and Instacart, and more. Prior to Pacvue, Burdick spent 10 years at Amazon, where she led development of the Amazon Ads business and played a key role in launching the e-commerce giant’s CPG/Health & Beauty retail business.