Raptor is upgrading their Merchandising offering with a ton of new features. We want to unlock our customers’ Retail Media potential by offering a range of capabilities that all aim at one goal: creating new revenue streams by taking advantage of existing infrastructure.

Retail Media is not a new phenomenon, but with increased focus on restricting third-party cookies and on retailers owning their own data (1st party data), the time is favorable for unleashing new revenue-generating concepts. Only a few retailers take advantage of the quite powerful and effective recommendation modules on their site to showcase products that are sponsored by suppliers. With new Merchandising features and especially much improved reporting focusing on providing insights into the full buying circle and on proving campaign effect, Raptor will offer some strong tools to any retailer who wants to create new revenue packages out of existing infrastructure.

This article will take you through the key features in the Merchandising upgrade. The features of the upgrade will gradually be released during the fall/winter of 2023/2024. Details and designs might change during implementation.

Introduction to the Merchandising products

After the upgrade, Merchandising will consist of five products serving five different purposes:

1. Boosted Campaigns
2. Pinned Campaigns
3. Bundles
4. Feeds
5. Exclusion Lists

Boosted Campaigns

Some new features will be introduced to Campaigns. Campaigns boost a set of products that will blend in as part of the existing strategies running in your respective web and mail recommendation modules. With the upgrade, Campaigns will be called Boosted Campaigns, and besides the well-known boosting levels allowing you to boost a selection or a query of products, the following features will be added:

• Run multiple campaigns in the same recommendation module: So far, it has not been possible to run multiple Merchandising campaigns in the same recommendation module. With the upgrade, you can arrange campaigns to be active in same modules at the same time, and you have the option to target different contexts (e.g., category pages, brand pages) enabling you to flexibly spread campaigns wider across your site
• Target the right CDP audiences: As an integrated part of building a campaign, you get the option to target specific audiences – also audiences from sister accounts. This is a great way of tying together your CDP and your recommendations.   
• Boost or de-boost: By boosting products you push them up front in your recommendation modules with one of three different boosting levels, and as a new capability you can also de-boost products not needing any attention – it could be commodity items that your customers will find anyway or products with a very low profit margin.  
• Sort by profit margin or popularity: When boosting products, they will be fitted to the strategy of the module the campaign has been activated in, meaning they will be sorted according to criteria like personal visit or buy history. Through Merchandising you can top this up by sorting the products either by profit margin or popularity, ensuring that your most attractive products among the boosted ones are presented to the shopper.  

Pinned Campaigns

With Pinned Campaigns you can dedicate one or more placements of your recommendation modules to one specific product, or you can let a set of products rotate on a specific placement. This way, you can guarantee your suppliers either a certain number of clicks or views or all eyeballs for a period and create a very transparent payment model towards your suppliers. Pinned placements can be restricted to specific contexts, like certain category pages or targeted certain CDP audiences.

Pinned Campaigns are great for creating new advertising product packages towards your suppliers. When new products hit your web shop, the supplier might be interested in positioning them in a certain context and expose them to a certain target group (audience). You can guarantee your supplier a specific number of impressions or clicks by setting up a Pinned Campaign and report the effect of the campaign back to the supplier. This fits your existing infrastructure and has the potential of creating new revenue streams.    

Bundles

Product Bundles will give you the tools to create and maintain groups of products that should always be shown together uninfluenced by usual product recommendation strategies. This feature will allow you to make complete-the-look recommendations or guarantee that a certain battery is always displayed along with a certain power tool. This will help you dictate product cohesion, when you in some cases do not want to rely on the wisdom of the crowd like in usual product recommendation. A specific recommendation module will be available for displaying bundles, offering you full flexibility when deciding how and where to display your bundles.

Exclusion Lists

Some products or product categories should never be displayed in any recommendation module due to either legislation or commercial concerns. With the Exclusion Lists feature you can select a subset of products or product categories from your product feed that should be excluded globally from being displayed in any recommendation module.  

Feeds

You might know the Feeds feature as Product Set Campaigns. It will give you the opportunity to create a separate feed of products to display through a separate module. This will give you the freedom to create product presentations wherever you like and apply features like personalization. A feed can be used to display e.g. a special offers tab on your website, in which all products are sorted according to the user's buy or visit history, overall popularity or on sale price. 

Next level reporting

An essential part of making it valuable for suppliers to engage in Merchandising campaigns is the ability to deliver detailed and precise performance insights. A very important focus of the Merchandising upgrade is proving the effect of a campaign, concerning number of impressions, number of clicks and revenue generated from the campaign.

Highlights of the enhanced reporting:

• Campaign performance funnel: See overall performance in a funnel view containing the total number of impressions a product in the campaign got, the number of clicks, number of times a product was bought, and finally, of course the revenue generated by the campaign. Here, you will also be able to see how many unique users made the events, and relative performance indicators like click-through rate and completion rate.
  
• Compare campaign period to a baseline period: To monitor the actual effect of a campaign, you should be able to compare the performance of the campaign to a baseline period. You will be able to select from a few specified timespans prior to the campaign, so that you can account for seasonal fluctuations or influence from marketing campaigns in other channels.
• Reporting by product: With the upgrade, you will have the ability to see metrics like impressions, clicks and campaign revenue on a product level. You can also group the metrics by e.g. brand or category. This will enable you to deliver very specific reporting back to the supplier.

We are always looking for feedback on our products and input to our roadmap. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have comments or questions.