Dec'16 to April'17: How Flipkart Ads' intent targeting fared in helping brands achieve greater ROI

Flipkart, the e-commerce giant, helps top brands achieve greater ROI on ad spend with rich targeting options on its advertising platform.

Today, customer targeting is significant for every business but especially for the e-commerce world, which is a fiercely competitive one and where businesses can easily go unnoticed if they aren't embracing the smart online marketing techniques. This phenomenon has led to the induction of 'intent marketing' in the e-commerce sector. For the newbies, intent marketing is any kind of marketing that is designed to meet an end user's intent, i.e., what they exactly want or need in that specific moment. Many top brands in the market, which are looking to invest in digital to reach the right audiences, have embraced 'intent marketing' to achieve better results.

Flipkart, which is India's leading e-commerce player, introduced 'targeting options' on its Ad platform in December last year. Since every buyer has a different demand; for some, the price is all that matters while for the rest, quality is of utmost importance, it becomes quite challenging for advertisers to cater every need. In this scenario, 'intent marketing' bridges the gap between the advertisers and the audiences having specialized demands.

The company claims to have provided a significant value addition by exposing extremely high-intent traffic to the advertisers with rich targeting options such as - 'Customers who browsed T-Shirt/Trousers in the last week', or 'Customers who bought a mobile phone/laptop in the last month' or 'Female customers (gender specific) who made a purchase of less than Rs 1000 in the the fashion category' etc.

Flipkart's Ad platform derives most of the targeting signals from real time customers' behavior on the platform, thereby, enabling the advertisers to capture the interest of the consumers across the platform and deliver them highly contextual ads.

The e-commerce giant has successfully tested the targeting signals across all the categories ranging from Lifestyle to Electronics. Initial results of the campaigns that were targeted saw an ROI jump of 1x to 4.13x as compared to the non-targeted campaigns.

From the above scenario, it can be safely concluded that the optimal targeting in ads has proved to be the best bargain for both customers and advertisers. It improves ad relevance and thus enhances the customer experience as well as the ROI on ad spend. Beholding Flipkart's understanding of the purchase intent of its 100 million transacting customers and the performance report of the first quarter, it is clear that the platform has the potential to provide better ad performance to the advertisers than the competition.