New Omni-Channel Managed Service Provides Full-Funnel Advertising Optimization For Amazon; Beta Trials Initiated for Instacart and other Retailers

Hundreds of Leading Consumer Brands Including Brawny, Quilted Northern, Black+Decker, Remington and Greenworks Use CommerceIQ Advertising to Accelerate Market Share Growth and Achieve Up to 40% Incremental Sales and 20% Improvement in Profitability

CommerceIQ, the leader in Ecommerce Channel Optimization, launched a fully managed omni-channel advertising service powered by CommerceIQ’s Machine Learning (ML) and automation platform and delivered by ecommerce experts and data scientists. The CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service ushers in a new approach to ecommerce advertising that moves beyond typical advertising strategies that only focus on optimizing return on advertising spend (ROAS), and instead focuses on using advertising to drive profitable market share growth. This is achieved through ecommerce channel optimization that connects advertising data, strategies and execution with key ecommerce growth levers including inventory, incremental sales, share of voice, promotions, pricing and content that are dynamically changing in the algorithmic world of ecommerce. In related news, CommerceIQ also announced that it has been officially accepted into the Amazon advertising partner program for Managed Service providers.

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CommerceIQ customers manage hundreds of leading consumer brands on Amazon,  driving more than $2.5Bn in sales and optimizing the ecommerce channel for profitable market share growth.

“Prior to CommerceIQ, we were making weekly or sometimes monthly bids and budget change decisions to optimize our advertising spend on Amazon and they were solely focused on driving return on ad spend, which provided a very limited measure of ecommerce effectiveness,” said Christy Wilhelmi, Sr Director of E-commerce for Georgia Pacific. “Now, with CommerceIQ, for the first time we are averaging 400K actions per month and advertising spend is optimized in near real time to drive incremental sales growth and competitive advantage.”

CommerceIQ delivers the industry’s first and only ecommerce channel optimization service that uses advertising to drive profitable market share growth and a sustained competitive advantage for consumer brands. CommerceIQ’s full-funnel (search and display), omni-channel managed service is delivered by ecommerce experts and data scientists and powered by CommerceIQ’s platform. This new service ushers in the industry’s first ecommerce channel optimization capabilities by enabling critical success factors:

Channel Optimization Approach to Ecommerce Advertising Using Share of Voice

The CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service takes an ecommerce channel optimization approach to advertising, focusing on  optimizing for Share of Voice (SoV) growth that ultimately translates to incremental sales and profitability rather than optimizing just for return on advertising spend (ROAS). This fully managed service uses CommerceIQ’s Share of Voice Builder to track thousands of constantly changing keywords, impacting SoV across retailers and automatically allocating advertising spend to trending keywords with a low share of search. This approach ensures that the majority of advertising spend is allocated to capture incremental demand rather than cannibalizing sales that the brand would have captured organically.

Recommendation and Automation Engine Powered by Machine Learning for Algorithmic Ecommerce 

The CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service uses ML to anticipate consumer behavior, market trends and competitive actions. These findings are integrated with retail point of sales, profitability and inventory data to optimize the ecommerce channel at scale. Using CommerceIQ’s Outcome-Based Strategy Builder, ecommerce experts from CommerceIQ partner with consumer brands to set business objectives for each of their product categories. The service then creates custom strategies and automates 1000’s of actions driven by proven machine learning algorithms in near real time to achieve specific business outcomes including awareness, share of voice, profitability, ROAS, in stock rate, conversion, and competitor conquesting.

“CommerceIQ’s channel optimization approach for Amazon lets us connect all Ecommerce levers with advertising spend. For example, we usually run promotions to drive conversion on our seasonal products. The CommerceIQ system automatically diverts ad spend and traffic to our deals to ensure success of promotions and drive incremental sales. Our recent promotion, powered by targeted advertising was so successful that our sales on an usual Sunday exceeded our Black Friday sales,” says Amy Zmolek, Marketing Manager at Greenworks.

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Omni Channel Support for Full Funnel Advertising Optimization 

The CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service supports full funnel channel optimization on Amazon across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Display Advertising. The service  provides detailed reporting and visibility into the impact of full funnel advertising investment on the entire shopper journey from awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy and loyalty for Amazon.  From a single unified dashboard, clients receive reporting on key KPIs including:  Total Sales, Ad Sales, Search Media Spend, Display Media  Spend, Incremental ROAS and Share of Voice.

Building on the success of the unique channel optimization approach for Amazon,  CommerceIQ  is also offering a beta trial of the advertising managed service for omni-channel retailers such as Instacart.  It takes a similar approach of tracking and optimizing for share of voice across channels in order to capture the increased ecommerce demand. CommerceIQ’s ecommerce experts bring deep omni-channel retail, digital media agency and data science backgrounds to craft tailored advertising strategies for each ecommerce retailer and utilize CommerceIQ’s advertising platform for campaign execution, delivering a technology enabled managed service to consumer brands.

”Having spent many years at Walmart and Amazon, I knew we needed an ecommerce partner with a technology-first approach to help us optimize supply chain, sales operations and retail media spend on Amazon,” said Steven Daigh, Senior Director of Ecommerce at Spectrum Brands. “I’ve been impressed by how quickly the CommerceIQ’s ecommerce experts have become an integral part of how we run and profitably grow our Amazon business. Today, we are operating at 1.7 million automations per month, resulting in a 75% increase across our Top-3 organic SOV keywords and positively impacting revenue.  We’re now extending our partnership to take the same approach with Display Advertising on Amazon DSP and search advertising on other retail channels. I couldn’t be happier with our relationship.”

Strategic Advisory Services Delivered by Data Scientists and Ecommerce Channel Experts

Every consumer brand is unique when it comes to ecommerce maturity, capabilities, market position and strategic objectives. In order to win, brands need to analyze data and then model business outcomes to create winning strategies and sustained competitive advantage. This requires business leaders to rely on highly accurate, data driven advice tuned to their business and market position. CommerceIQ’s team of experts not only perform day to day advertising management services but play the role of strategic advisor, utilizing the latest advancements in machine learning and data analytics to simulate customized business outcomes and help them make smart decisions on budget planning, cross-channel and category allocation, assortment planning, content, fulfillment, new product introduction and incrementality estimation. Brand teams gain complete visibility into the granular strategies,  key marketplace learnings as well as  reporting on full funnel marketing activities and channel performance.

Customer Choice of Service Model

CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service is powered by the CommerceIQ Advertising Platform. Recognizing that some customers may be mature enough in their capabilities to manage their advertising media spend in-house and want to have tighter control over their advertising strategy, CommerceIQ Advertising Managed Service offers two levels of service model and support to brands. Consumer brands that prefer to manage the advertising budget in-house can opt into CommerceIQ Advertising Platform along with support and training services. Brands that prefer holistic management of advertising budget can avail the entire gamut of day to day advertising management services and strategic advisory services along with the CommerceIQ platform.

“The recent Covid-19 epidemic has dramatically accelerated the transition to ecommerce and I fully expect that ecommerce will represent 30%-50% of retail sales in the next 5 years at the rate that it is growing today.  The time is now for consumer brands to adopt a new operating model that uses advertising to fully optimize the ecommerce channel and win in the algorithmic world of ecommerce,” said Guru Hariharan, CEO of CommerceIQ. “With this launch, CommerceIQ is delivering a fully managed service proven to help consumer brands create sustained competitive advantage and profitable revenue growth.”

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