2024 marks a significant milestone for marketers as Google rolled out Privacy Sandbox testing with 1% of Chrome traffic.
After the testing period, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority will systematically evaluate Criteo’s findings, along with insights from other participating industry companies, to contribute to informed decisions regarding Google’s upcoming cookie deprecation in the fourth quarter.
Against this backdrop of addressability changes, Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) data will become pivotal for performance marketers to drive unprecedented campaign precision.
SKU data refers to unique codes assigned to each distinct product or item in the retailer’s inventory and e-commerce platforms, used to track and manage individual products. It typically includes information such as product description, price, size, color, and other relevant details that help identify and manage inventory.
Add AI to the mix, and the potential of SKU data increases significantly from just playing a supportive role in backend operations to allowing marketers to generate greater insights to engage directly with users. Here’s how marketers can tap into the potential of SKU data and AI:
- Enhanced customer segmentation, improving personalization and targeting: SKU data facilitates customer segmentation based on purchasing behaviours and product preferences. Marketers can use this segmentation to create personalized, targeted campaigns for specific customer groups, enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. With the help of AI, marketers can optimize their advertising efforts by dynamically generating hyper-personalized ads from images, videos, and copy tailored to individual users’ preferences and behaviours. The combination of SKU data and AI can be leveraged to create targeted promotions or discounts for these products to drive sales.
- Granular reporting and analytics: SKU data can be used for detailed reporting and analytics to provide insights into the performance of individual products, product categories, and customer segments. SKU data can also contribute to the understanding of the customer journey through attribution modelling, enabling marketers to attribute conversions to specific products or categories, helping to identify the most successful aspects of their campaigns. This can be further improved with AI automating the data analytics to generate useful insights. Marketers will have more time to focus on new opportunities and the bigger picture to assess campaign effectiveness and refine strategies based on data-driven insights.
- E-commerce and advanced performance optimisation: SKU data is critical for optimising product pages to showcase products with high purchase intent, pricing strategies, and promotional activities. Marketers can use this data to identify top-performing products, optimize product listings, and refine pricing strategies to drive better conversion rates. These insights can also aid in cross-selling and upselling opportunities that allow marketers to recommend complementary products or upgrades based on a customer’s purchasing history. Marketers should leverage AI to manage complex tasks like predictive bidding, audience targeting, product recommendations, and dynamic creative optimization, acting as a marketer’s co-pilot. This integration of AI allows for enhanced decision-making and performance optimization, driving better conversion rates and overall business success.
The emphasis on direct relationships with customers and personalised marketing makes SKU data a crucial component of a comprehensive marketing strategy. In the absence of traditional tracking tools,
SKU data used in tandem with AI emerges as a guiding light, facilitating a nuanced understanding of customer behaviour and preferences and ultimately contributing to the effectiveness of marketing efforts in a new era of digital advertising.
