Sam’s Club Member Access Platform Now Offers Attribution for Ads
Sam’s Club advertisers can now attribute in-club purchases to their search ads, making the warehouse club retailer’s retail media platform among the first to connect search and sponsored product ads to offline sales.
Due to the real-time nature of consumer search, advertisers have long had challenges attributing sales to specific campaigns, with in-store attribution particularly difficult. Other retailers may offer offline reporting metrics, but they rely on loyalty card purchases or panel data, which are estimates that don’t include all consumer purchase behavior.
Meanwhile, Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) has real-time first-party omnichannel data on member transactions across in-club, in-app and web. As a result, MAP provides accurate transaction data without extrapolation or panel estimates. Advertisers now have the ability to see the exact revenue generated by each ad, including search and sponsored product campaigns.
For Sam’s Club MAP advertisers, overall return on ad spend has increased an average of almost 30% since adding in-club sales to the attribution mix, according to the retailer.
“Sam’s Club MAP is opening up a new era of transparency and efficiency in advertising,” noted Lex Josephs, VP and general manager of the platform. “Now, because of our unique knowledge of our members, we’re able to offer true closed-loop attribution for both online and offline sales. This gives advertisers unmatched visibility into the results of their search and sponsored product campaigns at a time when they need to make fewer resources go further.”
“With hybrid shopping as the new norm, consumers’ increasing use of search to plan for shopping in brick-and-mortar locations will enable us to seamlessly integrate physical trips and online shopping experiences,” said Paras Shah, director of omnichannel shopper marketing at Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific, a Sam’s Club MAP customer. “This integration allows us to power digitally enabled sales in-club, which is a game changer.”
“There’s a huge group of our members who see a search ad online or on their phone when shopping but purchase the product in-club,” observed Tim Simmons, SVP and chief product officer, Sam’s Club. “Previously, it was not possible for our advertisers to connect the in-club purchase to their online ads to know what drove sales. With our new attribution model, advertisers can understand what’s motivating purchases across all channels accurately, especially for search ads.”
In-club attribution is now available for all Sam’s Club advertisers with live sponsored product campaigns.
Sam’s Club, a division of Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart Inc., operates nearly 600 clubs in the United States and Puerto Rico. Each week, approximately 230 million customers and members visit Walmart’s more than 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites under 46 banners in 24 countries, with approximately 2.3 million associates worldwide. Walmart U.S. is No. 1 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2022 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America, while Sam’s Club is No. 8.
