Walmart may be on the defensive with prices, but it’s attacking on other fronts. Here’s a piece about its effort to grow its advertising business, leveraging its massive history of online and offline customer purchases. Amazon is growing its advertising revenues as well, although it’s still far behind Facebook and Google. Other major retailers are also using their customer data and Web reach to sell ads.
Optimove, which selects customer treatments based on movement between lifecycle stages, has expanded its scope to include acquisitions as well as existing customers. The new feature uses look-alike modeling to assign new Web site visitors to segments and then selects the most appropriate treatment for each segment. The company says that combining acquisition and retention marketing will yield an average 25% lift in conversion rates. If you’re keeping track: Optimove builds a unified, accessible, persistent customer database, making them a Customer Data Platform.
When it comes to picking ad buying systems, the software is less important than the data it can access. That’s the moral of this Digiday report that Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) is now tied with Google among ad buying agencies. Amazon’s software isn’t especially great but it has exclusive access to Amazon’s data on individual consumers’ shopping history. Low price and self-service options also weigh in Amazon’s favor.
Amperity has launched its Customer Data Cloud, a solution designed to support the transformation of raw data in a warehouse or lake into usable business assets. New capabilities include real-time reaction to streaming customer data and no-copy access to customer data in Snowflake and AWS.