Sam’s Club, Giant Eagle add new capabilities to retail media networks

Sam’s Club and Giant Eagle have both announced the addition of new capabilities to their retail media networks in an effort to close the loop for advertisers via their media sales performance data to track metrics. 

Walmart-owned Sam’s Club launched the Media and Sales Performance Dashboard, an integrated dashboard to serve as the central source of truth for campaign performance for Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP). The dashboard displays both Sam’s Club point-of-sale (POS) performance and Sam’s Club MAP media campaign metrics together to track the impact on business.

This new offering is a consolidated, self-service tool for both sponsored product ads and display campaigns, together with sales performance, in a single interface. The dashboard integrates with the point-of-sale platform (also known as MADRID) that Sam’s Club advertisers and merchants already use to track sales — which is also the same platform used internally by Sam's Club MAP.

The dashboard also provides advertisers with visibility into item sales, new buyers, in-club attribution from search, total ad-attributed sales, etc. Sam’s Club MAP is offering this to select advertising partners immediately and will onboarding more in the coming months.

Similarly, Giant Eagle’s Leap Media Group has introduced closed-loop reporting as a Beta offering for the remainder of 2023, where the new reporting attributes online and in-person sales back to campaigns in order to strengthen its retail media network. The Beta offering can be accessed immediately by current and new Leap partners.  

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The regional food retailer recently built and launched its Leap Media Group (Leap) retail media network in June and is now adding the reporting capabilities fueled by data from Giant Eagle’s myPerks loyalty platform. 

The reporting will allow brands to better measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts in a standardized proprietary way. In addition, the grocer said because Leap is self-built, Giant Eagle can provide relevant offers to its customers while maintaining data privacy. 

And, while the offering continues to evolve, the Leap team is developing features such as using near-real-time results to drive improvements to active campaigns.

Both announcements come after Albertsons decided to take on the task of standardizing retail media because there were no universal best practices, the company said back in June. 

Albertsons’ white paper on the Retail Media Standardization Framework aims to solve measurement issues by creating consistent measurement across two critical categories of metrics:

Media delivery and engagement metrics standards are based on key upper-funnel awareness and interaction metrics, such as impressions, viewable impressions, reach, frequency, clicks, click-through rates, and video views.

The framework provides standard definitions and calculation methodologies for all delivery and engagement metrics to ensure maximum comparability.

These proposed solutions leverage the trade group IAB (which has now taken the helm of the standardization process) and the Media Rating Council (MRC) definitions for broad adoption.

Sales and conversion standards focus on the most relevant lower-funnel

metrics, such as return on advertising spend (ROAS), incremental ROAS (iROAS), conversion rate, and new-to-brand households. The proposed standards for sales and conversion metrics have two components:

The Framework aims “to allow RMNs to adapt sales and conversion metrics to category or product-specific needs — for instance, shorter attribution windows for grocery versus

longer attribution windows for electronics — while supporting advertisers’ need to compare performances across RMN,” the white paper said.

Sam’s Club addressed this in its release stating, “Not every retail media platform offers incrementality measurement but those that do typically use their own internal methodology.”

However, it said that by contrast, Sam's Club MAP offers incrementality measurement such as iROAS and sales lift based on Circana’s methodology in post-campaign reporting.

Sam’s Club MAP has partnered with Circana again to bring the Media and Sales Performance Dashboard to advertisers. With this third-party validation, advertisers can drive in-flight optimization decisions confidently, without anyone “grading their own homework.”

“We understand the power that analytics can have on advertiser campaigns which is why we are delivering this new integrated dashboard,” said Lex Josephs, vice president and general manager of Sam's Club MAP. “It is the latest in an ongoing stream of continuous innovations we’re providing to deliver faster, more actionable insights. It gives advertisers access to performance metrics, enabling them to optimize campaigns while they are still in flight, driving stronger business outcomes.”

Justin Weinstein, Giant Eagle EVP, chief strategy and marketing officer, said, “In a world where consumer’s shopping habits and preferences are changing constantly, it’s critical brands have tools such as closed-loop reporting to determine what’s truly having an impact.” Leap’s audience consists of 14 million consumers that span online properties, apps, and more than 470 stores throughout western Pennsylvania, north central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland, and Indiana plus external properties.