Google adds retail media capabilities to SA360; Lowe becomes early beta partner

Delhi: To help retailers and brands achieve common goals, Google recently launched a closed beta in Search Ads 360 (SA360) for offsite retail media campaigns. 

Offsite retail media enables brand advertisers to reach more consumers in unique environments off the retailer website, while capturing product sales on the retailer website. 

In its blog post, Google revealed that its offsite retail media solution in SA360 enables advertisers to improve performance by combining retailer audiences with Google AI and scale across channels.

Ewan Fisher, Product Manager, SA360, remarked, “There’s a privacy-centric way created for participating retailers to enable brands to use their first-party data to fuel AI-powered Performance Max campaigns”

In addition, over the coming months, Google aims to test features that allow for self-service campaign management for brands and expand the beta to more retailers globally.

Google has also partnered with home improvement retailer Lowe’s as one of the early beta partners. Lowe’s is launching its first offsite retail media offering on Google Search and Shopping inventory, using a managed service model today and partnering with SA360 on the journey toward self-service options for their brand partners in the future.

The style of campaign management in SA360 is self-serve where retailers in the future will enable brands and their agencies to manage campaigns themselves.

With self-service, retailers will be able to selectively share first-party audiences with their brand partners in a privacy-centric way, without exposing user-level data. Shoppers will be directed to the product detail page of a retailer website where they can add products to a cart for purchase.

In addition, retailers will be able to share only the parts of their product inventory feeds that are relevant to a brand partner, so one brand never sees inventory details such as stock levels or pricing for other brands. This also ensures that consumers only see ads for in-stock products and brands don’t waste dollars to promote products that are out of stock. 

Retailers can selectively share sales and performance data for their brand partners, preventing a brand from seeing the retailer’s overall performance data. And retailers maintain visibility into their own campaigns and the campaigns of their brand manufacturer partners at all times.

In SA360’s self-service model, brands will be able to measure success of their campaigns with accurate, closed-loop reporting at the brand, campaign or stock-keeping unit (SKU) level. 

Closed-loop reporting enables brands to directly tie ad spend to sales at the individual product level and make changes to maximise profit. 

Agency partners will also be able to easily manage retail media campaigns for many brands from one centralised location and leverage SA360’s unique enterprise productivity tools.

In the future, Google will be supporting additional campaign types for offsite retail media, including Microsoft campaigns. More retail media features unique to SA360 in order to drive greater performance are also in the works, according to its blog post.