Digitizing supplier marketing: Increasing sales of products and services

When was the last time you went shopping online? If your answer can be measured in hours rather than days, you’re not alone. People are buying more things online more frequently than ever before: Almost all Americans with internet access have bought something online in their lifetime, and 80% did so in the past month alone.¹

Despite the growing trend towards online shopping, only 13% of supplier marketing dollars — the budgets that manufacturers and brands use to promote their products at the point of sale — are invested in digital. By underinvesting online, these advertisers are losing on possible in-store sales as well. After all, 70% of consumers make their initial product discovery online.²

Moving supplier marketing budgets online represents a key opportunity for any online business or publisher — be it in the retail, automotive, travel, or employment industries — that has unique insights and that understands the nuances of audience behavior, interests, and needs. First, though, advertisers need to be convinced that investing in digital offers a strong return on ad spend. Here’s where we can help.

Programmatic technologies have made it possible to drive higher ad performance for suppliers, reaching their ideal audiences more effectively with the right message at the right time.

By using a combination of our programmatic products — namely our ad server, Google Ad Manager, and our demand-side platform, Display & Video 360 — you can maximize the impact and performance of supplier marketing campaigns to:

• Reach audiences everywhere, efficiently
• Get a holistic view of your ideal audiences onsite and offsite
• Increase campaign relevance and effectiveness

1. Reach audiences everywhere

An effective supplier marketing campaign will optimize advertiser budgets wherever users are most likely to convert. Using Display & Video 360 along with Ad Manager lets you reach a supplier’s audiences across your properties and elsewhere on the web. The integrated stack means your workflows are efficient, there’s little discrepancy in your campaign reporting, and the integrity of all your data is easily maintained.

2. Get a holistic view of audiences across onsite and offsite

To effectively optimize supplier marketing campaigns, you need to understand the user’s entire journey. This is only possible when you pay attention to how they interact with all your web campaigns in addition to your own sites. Combining insights across Ad Manager and Display & Video 360 gives you this detailed and unified portrait to help tweak campaigns more effectively.

3. Increase campaign relevance and effectiveness

There’s no such thing as too many insights. Display & Video 360 can increase the relevance of campaign messages and target them more effectively with affinity segments, leading to better campaign performance and expanding existing insights about digital and store visitors.

Other capabilities like device-based segmentation and proximity-based positioning can help create more relevant and dynamic ads for users, served at the right moments, wherever they are, and whatever their device.

As consumers spend more time shopping online, we’re confident our programmatic platforms can help deliver the return suppliers are looking for to help you increase the share of point of sale or supplier marketing budgets online.

By Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management, Google Ad Manager, and Roshan Khan, Senior Product Manager, Google Marketing Platform 360