When Pacvue launched in 2018, retail media was just getting started as an industry. It sounded cutting-edge and mysterious. Today, there are more than 200 retail media networks and most analysts forecast that the retail media market is worth more than $150 billion this year.
One-fifth of global digital ad spend goes to retail media. More than half of brands run campaigns across five or more retail media networks. We all know why: retail media drives results.
Traditionally, retail media has focused heavily on lower-funnel tactics, such as driving immediate purchases through Sponsored Product ads to customers who are already ready to buy. But, like everything in tech, things are changing. At Pacvue, our data has shown significant drops in return-on-ad-spend in 2024 compared to 2023. The market has matured and gotten more crowded, which means ads are getting more expensive. It’s starting to become a race to the bottom, where the biggest discount gets the customer but it doesn’t always drive return-on-ad-spend.
This year, retailers are starting to focus on tools that allow brands and agencies to move retail media strategies up the funnel. At the end of 2024, Amazon announced that advertisers could now integrate their own customer data into the targeting, optimization, and measurement capabilities of Amazon DSP. And now, with Walmart Onsite Display Advertising, Pacvue and Walmart are showing what full-funnel retail media can look like.
Here’s how:
1. Optimize Multiple Campaigns at Once.
With Pacvue’s Walmart Display Campaign Management, advertisers finally get a central place to quickly modify multiple campaigns at once. With batch updates, you can optimize in bulk. That means you can save a lot of time as you adjust ad strategies for item sets, creatives, and attributes while understanding how campaigns are performing based on those tactics.
2. Segment Walmart Audiences by Behavior, Context, and Demographics.
Forget broad keyword targeting – with Walmart Onsite Display, advertisers can now create precise audience segments for each campaign based on Walmart’s first-party data across both web and app data. By targeting shoppers based on purchase history, behavior, context, and demographics, you can build advanced advertising strategies that efficiently and effectively reach new buyers, focus on loyal customers, or dynamically target shoppers at multiple touchpoints in their journey.
3. Get More Transparency and More Control with New Tools.
One of the most exciting new features of Walmart Campaign Management is that you can access a 360-degree view of audience engagement, campaign effectiveness, and sales impact from My Report right from Pacvue. This gives you detailed and granular insights into which strategies, products, and tactics are performing best.
You can combine that with enhanced optimizations such as Budget Management, Dayparting, and Campaign Rules to help automate your optimizations based on first-party data directly from Walmart – guaranteeing a new level of efficiency.
The Full-Funnel Future
There are three pillars to full-funnel retail media: precision, control, and transparency. Because to run a full-funnel retail media strategy, advertisers need to optimize not just for conversion, but for long-tail customer loyalty. With Pacvue and Walmart Onsite Display Ads, brands and agencies finally have the control they need to build not just sales, but real customer relationships across the Walmart ecosystem from start to finish.
