Retail advertisers know that new growth in crowded markets requires competing for shoppers. 51% of respondents to a January ecommerce priorities study identify “Competing with larger ecommerce players or marketplaces” as a primary challenge for 2024. Retail advertisers need methods for cutting through the noise in order to win incremental share or even to maintain the share they have. That means finding different channels to reach new shoppers or additional ways of influencing shoppers.

The challenge and the opportunity for retailers is clear, but for many the solution to incremental sales is not. In our first post of this series we explore the definition of incrementality and consider approaches to measurement. We suggest marketers dissect the component parts of retail advertising and focus on two groups of outcomes that can be measured, Incremental Opportunity (tapping new sources, increasing impressions and finding new shoppers) and Incremental Performance (gaining share, efficiency of budgets and performance to campaign goals). Framing the challenge of incrementality in two parts, new shoppers and better performance, is the first step to make this larger existential challenge more approachable for retailers.

This is an update on our ecommerce incrementality series. It’s a playbook of sorts, with recommendations for how to gain incremental opportunity by:

• incentivizing better or even exclusive access to shopper traffic
• finding millions of new young shoppers as future loyal customers
• gaining up to 25% more share of shopper impressions
• finding traffic that delivers up to 2X the new customer ratio than other channels