A look into how DSPs can help you this holiday season.

The holidays are fast approaching and while we are still putting the finishing touches on our Halloween costumes, e-commerce marketers are preparing now for their upcoming holiday strategy. This year has been different for everyone given the struggles we have all faced with COVID-19, not to mention the strain it has put on the economy. Now more than ever, e-commerce businesses as well as direct to consumer companies are going to need to get more creative with how they invest their marketing dollars. Luckily, Moloco is here to help make some suggestions.

Let’s take a deeper look into how a DSP can improve your e-commerce strategy...

Steadily grow your User Acquisition

E-commerce companies typically begin making money by selling their products online, but since the smartphone made its debut in the early 2000s, we’re seeing more and more e-commerce companies branching out into proprietary apps to capture their piece of the mobile buyer ecosystem more easily. The problem that these companies often face is ‘how do we create a strategy where we can capture new users in an efficient way?’

User Acquisition (UA) is a huge part of any successful mobile app. What a good DSP provides you with are machine learning algorithms that can be trained per app to explore and find brand new users, at scale, that will make a purchase. Experienced UA managers already know the tendencies of their customers online, so why not utilize a DSP to gather more information through mobile?

Did you know?: Oftentimes DSPs are not able to share all the intricacies of the user data that they collect, but Moloco’s new platform Moloco Cloud is unique in that it gives users access to impression-level data logs! These logs enable e-commerce apps to supplement their own internal data, collected from the buying habits of their target consumers, in order to make a more advanced targeting strategy.

These powerful machine learning algorithms can help e-commerce apps to target users based on specific KPIs. They now have the ability to broaden their target goal by optimizing based on in-app events like first purchase or registration.

But what happens if you are looking to acquire completely new users that don’t have a purchase history with your app? Not only do DSPs prove to be a successful solution for e-commerce apps that already know their users, they can also use Dynamic Creatives (DCR) to show relevant content to new users as well through sophisticated models. These models use advanced machine learning algorithms to investigate similarities between new and existing users in order to make predictions on the most suitable goods like best selling items or products that may be tailored to the viewers personal interests.

Re-engage Lapsed Users

Dynamic Creative (DCR) is an incredibly powerful tool especially for e-commerce apps trying to re-engage their lapsed users. On average, users delete their newly downloaded apps 5.8 days after being last used. The question that e-commerce marketers always face is “how can we get those users back in our app while getting them to be more engaged than ever?”

Specifically targeting those lapsed users with highly tailored content proves to be a successful technique for re-engagement. When e-commerce apps share the device IDs of users that they have witnessed install and then uninstall their apps, DSPs can then use that group to specifically target. There are lots of ways that you can encourage users to reinstall but some methods that have proven successful are using promotions, discounts, and DCRs that take into account everything we know about that user.

That's right, DCRs are able to identify the best-suited product to display based on the user’s tendencies, user habits, and overall purchase trends. The prediction model can identify how likely these users will convert into a paying customer and thus what the most efficient ad price should be. Due to these capabilities, this is an ideal product for not only new users but also for any retargeting efforts as well.

What can Moloco's DCR solution do for you? This feature allows for different ad templates that can be utilized to see which format works best for the consumer. Do they prefer a carousel with multiple product options strategically curated for them by our leading algorithms? Or do they convert more successfully when they have a single product in a full-screen interstitial ad?

Retarget Your Product Offers

Now that we walked you through how to get new users, and how to get users to re-engage with your e-commerce app, the final piece of this puzzle is how you can actually encourage your current users to make purchases within your app.

This is where retargeting comes in. Retargeting allows you to target users that may have shown interest in one of your products by clicking on it, or even adding to their cart, but have yet to pull the trigger and actually proceed to checkout.

A good DSP should have a solution for that! They can help you identify the buying habits of the users and work towards showing them the right ad at the right time.

Did you know? Moloco's DCR solution has seen purchase events increase up to 49% using retargeting within one week of a users app install, by generating personalized ads in real-time. Moloco can regularly update product catalogues to reflect any price changes or fluctuations with inventory making our e-commerce marketers’ lives easier than ever.

Optimize Your Current Strategy

With this 2020 holiday shopping season, e-commerce marketers have to be smart in the way that they approach their strategy. Planning is going to be key to making sure this season is fully taken advantage of. There are lots of ways in which marketers can adjust their plans in order to better improve upon tactics for the end-of-the-year shopping rush. DSPs offer a wide range of levers to pull, and optimizations to try to help ensure you are successful in reaching your goals. Here are a few tactics that could work for you:

• Test, test, test: Take the time to really focus on ways you can A/B test your product offerings. Experiment with different offers, price points, discounts and messaging. You might surprise yourself with what works and what doesn't!
• Refresh creatives: Your advertising creative assets are a huge part of what makes your target audience engage. Try to dissect what tactics are really driving your ROAS and then build on what is working.
• Establish benchmarks: It may sound obvious but establishing benchmarks for your KPIs like CPI and CPA are hugely helpful. Having a goal to work towards will help to focus your efforts and keep your eye on the prize.
• Build your audience pool for retargeting: Take a step back and get organized. By placing your users into different tiered buckets, you give yourself more control over which people see what. Be intelligent about which users you show your most expensive items to and which users have proven they are not interested.
• Don't be afraid to scale: Optimizations are ongoing because you never know what new methods might work! When you find something that is giving you success, lean into it. By scaling your campaign, you are investing in something you have proof is successful.
• Who doesn't love a deal?: Promotions will likely play a big part this year in how consumers shop. Not only are people excited to "revenge shop" after this year's pandemic, they may also want to be more fiscally responsible. Unemployment rates in the US in particular are high, so offering that extra buyer's assurance and showing your shoppers that they are getting a "deal" will help to drive the purchase.

Another Monetization Outlet

We know that your ultimate goal as an e-commerce marketer is to drive sales, and DSPs are an awesome way to do that; but what if you want more out of your DSP? What if you not only want to advertise your e-commerce app on different publisher’s apps, but you want to essentially turn your app into a mini advertising platform to help increase monetization?

A product offering like this would help e-commerce apps to build their own advertising platform for their sellers while also giving them all the advantages that a typical DSP has to offer.

Can Moloco help us monetize too? We will admit, this isn’t a common product offering from your typical DSP but with Moloco Engine, we make that possible for you. Not only will you have the opportunity to utilize Moloco's entire publisher inventory through Moloco Cloud, but will also be creating a brand new monetization funnel. e-commerce apps looking to adopt this solution will be able to run their sellers’ ads on their platform while still being able to utilize Moloco's dynamic creatives and intelligent UA models both of which are backed by powerful machine learning algorithms.

Through data-driven marketing solutions, Moloco’s programmatic advertising enables e-commerce marketers to utilize their data to its fullest potential. This is a secret that gaming apps have known about for many years and fortunately, the secret is starting to get out...programmatic advertising can work for lots of different verticals, including e-commerce.