Audience Ads: much more than a display banner – targeted advertising in the customer’s visual field with contextual targeting

Audience Ads are personalised display banners that are placed in the shopping environment, on the homepage, the category overview pages, and on search result pages – both on desktop and mobile. Their core feature is personalised advertising. The targeting of the personalised display banners is based on Douglas’ customer data. If customers browse douglas.de and are interested in make-up, for example, according to their purchase history and web behaviour they are modelled into a shopping persona, and shown only the banners relevant to them during their shopper journey. Audience Ads reach customers directly while they are shopping and open to inspiration on what products to buy before check out. Audience Ads are thus regarded as an awareness and branding tool that provides the final impulse for a purchase decision due to the immediate proximity to the digital point of sale. Billing is done on a CPM basis, where the CPM is dependent on targeting depth and placement.

Personalised shopping environment 

The key advantages of Audience Ads come from the target group specific approach. Every target group on douglas.de sees a different Audience ad that is personalized to their individual shopping behaviour. Through personalisation, DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS can tailor a custom shopping environment with much higher relevancy for the Douglas customer, leading to higher engagement and strong performance compared to other media spend. This ensures that, regardless of whether the target groups are large or small, the right people are directed to the advertised product, and media budgets are better utilised.

DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS does not only works with top brands that have a large media budget. For smaller brands with smaller target group potential, Audience Ads offer a way to implement efficient media objectives and to address Douglas customers relevant to the brand. For both large and small brands, Audience Ads are therefore absolutely performance-oriented and suitable.

Use visibility to drive purchases

Audience Ads can help a brand to increase its conversion rate. DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS works with control groups and can directly demonstrate that “users who have seen the ad” versus “users who have not seen the ad” show a higher likelihood of adding the respective product to the shopping cart and ultimately buying it.

“The visibility of Audience Ads definitely generates a buying impulse and increases the conversion rate. You can also expect to see an increase in sales during the campaign period, in comparison to before. We also track this.“ – Aylin Ersan, Head of Digital Media & Retail Media Lead, Douglas Marketing Solutions

Audience Ads are strategically placed in the upper-to-mid-funnel and are targeted at sales, as the banner format creates awareness for the brand through its visual character and at the same time guides the relevant user’s purchase decision in the direction of the advertised brand.

Multifaceted targeting

There are three options for targeting. Using the purchase history, a segment can be defined that only includes customers who regularly shop in a certain category (e.g. fragrances). This method offers many options and is very versatile, as large ready-to-use audiences, as well as smaller, more targeted customer segments can be created individually. Furthermore, the current browsing behaviour of customers can be used to identify people who are interested in a certain product (e.g. a face cream) at this very moment.

The CRM data obtained via the Douglas Beauty Card offers a further targeting opportunity. With this, individual customer segments can be created that are based on individual insights. DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS has the opportunity to take an individual approach and find an answer to individual challenges. For example, a brand that offers its products in several categories can pursue a cross-selling approach by addressing market buyers who previously only bought the products of the brand in one category. The customer who was previously only interested in fragrances of one brand, for example, is now being shown advertisements for make-up of that brand.

“Audience Ads are targeted. We work with targetings that are not possible like this for others. We work with our own customer data and can offer a high level of personalisation.“ – Aylin Ersan, Head of Digital Media & Retail Media Lead, Douglas Marketing Solutions

Ads placed directly in the shopper journey

You can create a new image for your brand with two different ad formats. 

The product slider is a format on the homepage of douglas.de. The advantage of this format is the interaction of a branding element and a product carousel underneath. This allows a combination of branding and a sales-boosting element to be implemented, so that a wider range of products from the range can be shown.

With the split teaser on the category overview pages on douglas.de (e.g. women’s fragrance), your products appear where customers can get information and inspiration. They are directly integrated into the product catalogue and thus provide a buying impulse by bringing the advertised product into the relevant set.

Audience Ads are visible almost everywhere on douglas.de: on the homepage, search results page and category overview page. Depending on where a user is located, there is usually also an audience ad that is targeted to that user. However, Audience Ads do not appear in the respective brand shops, as this is reserved exclusively for the brands. Only the one brand should advertise there.

Visible success – measurable with KPIs

There are basically three very interesting metrics: conversion rate uplift, revenue evolution and market share evolution.

The conversion rate uplift compares the behaviour of the users from the above-mentioned control group with the behaviour of the users who saw the ad and tells us how many more times a user with visual contact added the advertised product(s) to the shopping basket and bought it/them.

The revenue evolution indicates by how much the sales of the advertised products have increased during the campaign period. The DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS team builds an index in order to compare the sales before, during and after the campaign and to show the influence of the campaign on the sales evolution during the campaign.

In order to be able to better understand the revenue evolution, since seasonal factors can have an influence on sales, the market share evolution is also shown. This can be used to determine the extent to which the advertised products have gained market share in the corresponding category during the campaign.

Individual campaigns

With Audience Ads, you are buying a visibility service based on a CPM billing model. DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS acts as a consultant with a focus on the relevant target group. The team will create a media recommendation tailored to your brand, which includes campaign consultancy, identification of the target group, budget and time frame recommendation, as well as advice on the formats – always with the aim of achieving the best possible result for your brand!