Closing the Off-Site Media Attribution Gap with Oliver Leigh of Portal | Ask An Expert
The Fall retail conference season is officially underway, with NRF Paris having just wrapped and Groceryshop, Shoptalk Fall, NACS, and many others just weeks away. Omni Talk figured what better way to get ready for the upcoming season than to put together our primer of the must-see tech that has caught our attention this year.
This episode features Portal’s section of our Fall Conference Season “Must-See” Tech Preview, where Oliver Leigh, CEO & Co-Founder of Portal, explores how CPG brands can gain greater visibility into what happens after shoppers click on off-site digital advertising.
Brands investing in platforms like Meta, TikTok and Google often lose visibility once shoppers leave the ad and head to a third-party retailer. Oliver explains how Portal captures critical e-commerce funnel metrics such as bounce rates, add-to-cart activity and conversion performance, giving CPG brands a clearer picture of how their off-site media is translating into retail outcomes while maintaining privacy and compliance.
Be sure to check out the rest of our podcasts this past week and the next few to catch exclusive content from some of the biggest retail conferences!
We can’t think of a better way to get a bird's eye view into the tech shaping the retail of tomorrow, today!
P.S. To explore more conversations from the Omni Talk Ask an Expert Series, head here.
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Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Welcome to the webinar.
Speaker B:CEO and co founder of Portal Oliver Lee.
Speaker A:Thank you very much, Ben.
Speaker A:It's great to be here.
Speaker A:Thanks for having me.
Speaker B:So, Ollie, come on, give us.
Speaker B:I gave a little bit of context in my intro, but let's get into details.
Speaker B:What is the problem people that you set out to solve with Portal?
Speaker A:I'm a media guy.
Speaker A:I've been in advertising my entire career.
Speaker A:I've worked in lots of different types of media and advertising.
Speaker A:But my career has led me down a path to work with consumer products, goods, brands.
Speaker A:So think L', Oreal, Unilever and AB InBev.
Speaker A:And in working with these companies, we recognized that digital spend was becoming more important.
Speaker A:It's where consumers spend all their time and attention.
Speaker A:Yet if you're a CPG brand that manufactures but doesn't sell direct to consumer, you rely heavily on retailers to sell that product for you.
Speaker A:And so what comes with digital media is the opportunity to drive traffic somewhere, hopefully somewhere where a customer can then buy your product.
Speaker A:And so CPG brands are sending traffic to environments where they don't own the website.
Speaker A:And we realized that they weren't getting much data back from those third party websites, those retailers, and that was causing challenges with understanding media effectiveness.
Speaker A:What works, what doesn't work, where to continue to deploy spend.
Speaker A:And we set out to solve that challenge across the CPG landscape.
Speaker C:So Ali, why don't the traditional ways of mapping customer journeys work?
Speaker C:Why did you need to create this solution to begin with?
Speaker A:Yeah, so traditionally if you own your own website, Chris, you can deploy a Google Analytics tag, for example, and then when traffic comes from Meta or Google or TikTok, you can see where that traffic's come from, which specific campaign creative influencer, and you can understand how effective that media channel might have been for you.
Speaker A:But retailers don't let CPG brands put their Google Analytics tag on their website for obvious reasons.
Speaker A:Which means that the process of getting any understanding of post, click, consumer session behavior becomes a very manual one and the data isn't passed back as frequently or in the right format that a CPG would need to actually make on the fly decisions of their marketing.
Speaker A:And that is the challenge that we recognize and looking to solve.
Speaker B:Ollie, if you are a D2C manufacturer, what is the sort of information that you'd be getting that a traditional CPG selling through a grocer, for example, wouldn't be able to see?
Speaker A:Yeah, great question.
Speaker A:So you get an understanding from which different touch points that you're acquiring customers from externally are Driving bounce rate, for example.
Speaker A:Which ones are successful at driving add to cart behavior, which ones which can.
Speaker A:Which advertising channels are actually very successful in driving conversions for you Average session duration.
Speaker A:What else do they explore?
Speaker A:Categories, different parts of your page and your website.
Speaker A:So anything post click is invisible to those CPG brands and a DTC advertiser has complete access to that data set.
Speaker B:Okay, and that's the, the power of that, that traditional DTC mindset is that you can watch that constantly and then switch your spend really quickly with a absolutely agility that the CPGs, the larger branded CPGs have been losing.
Speaker B:So come on then Ollie, that sounds great.
Speaker B:How does your solution work and what does an implementation actually look like?
Speaker A:Yeah, sure, I'm happy to dive into that.
Speaker A:So the method of gathering analytics that we've created is something that's bespoke and unique to our business.
Speaker A:It's an innovation.
Speaker A:It's something that my business partner and I came up with, conceptualized, spent time developing and we now are refining that product and the way in which it works is it intercepts the traffic between the customer's browser when that customer clicks and the retail website we are looking to track.
Speaker A:We call these implementations analytics portals, hence the name of the business.
Speaker A:And these analytics portals are custom configured for the advertising CPG brand we're working with and the specific third party retail environment we're looking to track.
Speaker A:Implementation is simple.
Speaker A:The CPG brand tells us which retailers they'd like to track.
Speaker A:We either go and build an analytics layer from scratch for that new retail environment or we'll configure an existing infrastructure that we've built for another client based on their specific brands.
Speaker A:And implementation is very simple.
Speaker A:They would change their destination URLs in their ad platforms.
Speaker A:So your Meta, your TikTok, your Google Ads to be purpose built portal tracking URLs and that's it.
Speaker A:Once the customer clicks on those links, they're now accessing that retailer's website through an alternative tracking layer that allows us to gather this information and share it back with the CPG brand.
Speaker A:There is another piece of implementation which is a bit of a game changer for our clients, which is we allow them to embed their advertising pixels from meta, Google, Google Ads or TikTok into these analytics portals which allows us to send real time event signals back to their ad platforms so that they can now benefit from campaign optimizations much like a D2C brand would.
Speaker A:Ben, like we discussed.
Speaker B:Before I let Chris jump in, I'm going to ask you this is probably a silly layman's question, so bear with me.
Speaker B:But why can't I just.
Speaker B:If I'm a cpg, why can't I just put those pixels directly onto the retailer's website?
Speaker A:Technically, you could be, but it's whether the retailer would allow you to.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And if you put your pixel onto the retailer's website, you'd see everything that happens on that website.
Speaker A:You wouldn't just see what happens from your media, from your sessions that you pay for.
Speaker A:You'd see the entirety of what goes on on Walmart, what goes on on Amazon, what goes on on Target.
Speaker A:And that's why these retailers don't allow that to happen.
Speaker A:Because if they let.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker A:Chris.
Speaker A:If.
Speaker A:If Amazon or Walmart.
Speaker A:Let's take Walmart lets l' Oreal Paris put their conversion pictures from Meta on their website.
Speaker A:L' Oreal Paris is going to want to put not just their Meta pixel, they're going to want to put their TikTok, their Google.
Speaker A:L' Oreal Paris is one of 40 brands that L' Oreal owns.
Speaker A:That's 120 pixels just for L'.
Speaker A:Oreal.
Speaker A:Then Unity will want to do it, then PNG would want to do it, then Bearsdorf would want to do it, and we would have thousands upon thousands of conversion pixels that saw everything that happened on the retailer's website.
Speaker A:Our solution differs.
Speaker A:We allow the CPG brand to only measure and optimize the session that they paid for.
Speaker A:And then our technology and infrastructure leaves as soon as the customer finishes that session.
Speaker C:All right, so, Ali, I want to, you know, Ben and I pride ourselves at omnitalk of, you know, you know, trying to ask as frank and candid questions as we can.
Speaker C:And so I want to put your feet to the fire a little bit, because if I had a nickel for every time a solutions provider told me that they can provide all kinds of data at the fingertips of either a CPG or a retailer, I probably wouldn't be needing to do this podcast right now.
Speaker C:So my question for you is all the data sounds great, but can the brands actually act on it?
Speaker A:Yeah, great question.
Speaker A:So our business is simply about two things.
Speaker A:One is analytics and optimization, and the other is optimization.
Speaker A:So the analytics point of view is all about insights.
Speaker A:So we try.
Speaker A:And what we have built within our dashboard and interface is to not just surface millions of lines of data and code in raw format, but to actually build reports that are easily understandable when it comes to understanding insights to do with your specific marketing campaign.
Speaker A:So we use data to Reflect where investment should be increased, where investments should be decreased.
Speaker A:We try to surface reports that are engaging that can help customers actually act upon that data in real time.
Speaker A:Because we are big believers that these aren't necessarily data teams that are using the platform.
Speaker A:They're marketers, they're brand marketers and they want to understand what's working and whatnot.
Speaker A:And they want to have frank and simple conversations about where to continue investing.
Speaker A:So really topical conversation for us because as much as technologists and product developers, we believe that this report or style is how customers want to see the data.
Speaker A:One thing we've just released is the ability for you to ask your own question of the data.
Speaker A:So an MCP connection to the raw back end, which our current clients are really picking up with a lot of engagement because it means the way in which they ask the question versus which how we've just displayed the data could be two different things.
Speaker A:And so that's really helping us answer that and making sure that there is no doubt that when you implement the platform, you can see those insights and actually action them on a daily basis.
Speaker C:Ali, is there a typical data point that you see the brands, the brands using from your platform consistently that's providing value to them?
Speaker A:Yeah, I would say it's not just one, Chris.
Speaker A:It's probably three hero data points and they are naturally all to do with the commerce funnel.
Speaker A:So the first, most important data point, and I'll talk to them sort of as the customer journey flows.
Speaker A:The first is bounce rate.
Speaker A:They've never seen bounce rate before.
Speaker A:They need to understand bounce rate and dissect performance on bounce rate.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Which is to your earlier point, Ben, a D2C brand would have that access, had had that access since day one of operating as a company.
Speaker A:So understanding, you know, channels that have high bounce rate and really understanding what is the role in the marketing mix and how much vigor should we look at that bounce rate with.
Speaker A:And then it flows into add to carts.
Speaker A:So and hopefully you can get what I'm getting at here, which is different point points in the funnel awareness.
Speaker A:You're going to look at bounce rate in the consideration stage of your funnel.
Speaker A:You might look at add to cart to us and what we talk about every single day with our clients.
Speaker A:Is there' no better action to track for somebody who's considering your product than somebody that's adding it to cart.
Speaker A:That is pure consideration.
Speaker A:The number one metric is conversions.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:How many people are clicking on different assets, different channels and then going on to actually convert for this product?
Speaker A:And that is the most important metric because it gives us that tied back to roi.
Speaker B:Okay, Ollie, to keep diving down into more detail, can you help us out with a case study or an example of somebody that's put this into place and is driving this change in behav and ultimately sales benefit from your actions.
Speaker A:We work really closely with Caro Healthcare.
Speaker A:So Caro Healthcare are one of the largest CPG manufacturers in the Nordic market.
Speaker A:They've been using our platform not just for one singular brand and one singular retailer.
Speaker A:This is rolled out across multiple markets for every brand in their portfolio.
Speaker A:And we track multiple channels and I can give you a few examples of channels that they have optimized using our platform.
Speaker A:So they went through the same process that pretty much every CPG brand goes through with us, which is they plugged in our tool and what we said to them is, before we make any recommendations on the data, let's just observe how you're currently performing.
Speaker A:Where are you currently at?
Speaker A:And what we found was initially that some of the hero brands that they're investing traffic on, TikTok or metaphor were actually inspiring 90% bounce rate and above.
Speaker A:And we have this in a published case study.
Speaker A:And that bounce rate was alarming to the internal teams as to, okay, we're investing in media, it's not all aware there's some consideration in here, but actually 90% of the traffic's bouncing.
Speaker A:That's not really what we wanted from this investment.
Speaker A:And they asked us how can we change that.
Speaker A:And so without changing creative audience targeting or anything else to do with their media construct, all we asked them to do was to start using the conversion pixel implementation.
Speaker A:So optimize towards events that are happening in the sessions that we're tracking, which is obviously new data stream.
Speaker A:And let's challenge these ad platforms to drive better outcomes for you.
Speaker A:So look for commerce behavior.
Speaker A:And what we're able to prove is that when you give meta a quality data stream and tell it what you're after, I. E Optimize towards add to cart or optimize towards conversions, we saw that bounce rate drop from 90 to 50%.
Speaker A:We saw add to carts increase and we saw conversions similarly increase.
Speaker A:Now we've then taken those case studies, deployed them across brands across the entire portfolio, different retailer environments, we're able to prove to them that when they invest in native advertising through a specific Nordic publisher, which was all about pushing out content to do with specific ailments and then positioning their products as the solution to those ailments, this was a really high quality channel for them that they were underinvesting in and that was actually driving high quality commerce outcomes at their retailers.
Speaker A:And this is data they never had before and it allowed them to move budgets around accordingly.
Speaker A:And they've actually been growing quite rapidly in the Nordic region, both online and holistically in offline as well.
Speaker A:And so we'd like to think we have a key part to play in that growth.
Speaker C:So, Ali, all this gets me thinking too.
Speaker C:Like if I'm a retailer watching this or evaluating this and just trying to keep tabs of how the landscape is shaping up, I mean, I think I potentially know the answer to this.
Speaker C:I think it probably depends.
Speaker C:The answer is probably that it depends on the quality of your website and your retail media platform.
Speaker C:But will the average retailer look at this as a threat or as an opportunity?
Speaker A:That's a really great question and it does depend on your maturity as a retailer.
Speaker A:You're absolutely correct.
Speaker A:Where I think perhaps that can be, could be overlooked is if you are a retailer and you're running, you have an on site offering.
Speaker A:Our technology does not interfere with that whatsoever.
Speaker A:It's really important to note that what we're not doing is trying to tell CPG brands that Chris Waltonmail.com just bought these five products across these five categories.
Speaker A:That is not what the platform is doing.
Speaker A:It's taking anonymous non pii data and tying it back to traffic sources that the CPG brand is investing off site.
Speaker A:Now, if you're a retailer that has aspirations to grow their retail media revenue streams, we're operating in a lane that's completely untouched at the moment, which is CPG brands are continuing to invest in their own awareness and own consideration.
Speaker A:Of course they're playing in the lower funnel, giving some budgets to specific retailers to run on site and even in some cases off site media with those retailers.
Speaker A:But they're not tapping into those big budget pools that top of funnel awareness consideration.
Speaker A:And what we enabled CPG brands to do is to build that full funnel execution off site.
Speaker A:Now, what we are exploring actively right now is the ability to actually work with retailers so that we can actually start pushing this technology out to many supplier brands so that these case study results we see for CPG brands around Europe that we're currently working with can be deployed at scale through an entire portfolio of supplier brands for a retailer.
Speaker B:And surely, Ollie, unless I'm misreading this for a retailer, if your brands are all optimizing their traffic to bring better quality to your website, then that feels.
Speaker A:Like a win win yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Ben, you hit the nail on the head and that's something that we preach day in, day out, which is that even if we work solely with a CPG brand, Chris, to your point before, who is the ultimate beneficiary of uplift, of reduction in bounce rate, increase in add to cart, increasing conversion?
Speaker A:It's the retailer at the end of the day.
Speaker A:So you're absolutely correct, and I think that's why we've been successful today, is that the tool is win, win, win for everybody involved.
Speaker A:And we've predominantly focused on CPG brands to now.
Speaker A:But the next phase of the business is to start to work with retailers and actually share our technology with them so they can improve quality of traffic coming into their website from these paid media channels and the supplier brands that they're working with.
Speaker B:Ollie, we're going to get you out of here, but one last bit.
Speaker B:The grocery shop starts on Tuesday.
Speaker B:We're almost there.
Speaker B:You were saying to me just before we came on that you're going to be there.
Speaker B:So any retailers or brands are listening and they want to cook up with you, they want to talk, they want to hear you preach even further.
Speaker B:How should they do that?
Speaker B:How should they get in touch?
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:So I'm going to be at the event all the way through from Tuesday to Thursday.
Speaker A:I'll be presenting on stage Wednesday morning.
Speaker A:Morning.
Speaker A:I've been invited by the grocery shop team to jump on and talk a bit about what we're doing.
Speaker A:So please do come and see me then, but you can connect with me on LinkedIn, let me know that you're going to be there and I hope to meet some CPG brands and retailers while I'm spending time in the States next week.
Speaker B:Oliver, fantastic.
Speaker B:We'll see you in the Vegas next week.
Speaker B:Safe travels.
Speaker B:Thanks again.
Speaker A:Thanks very much.
Speaker A:Appreciate it.
Speaker C:Thanks, Ollie.
Speaker B:So, Chris, that was you meeting Ollie for the first time.
Speaker B:What did you take away from that conversation?
Speaker C:I had a number of takeaways, I think.
Speaker C:First of all, first of all, my big takeaway was great find to you.
Speaker C:Kudos, my friend.
Speaker C:And that's why we're doing this.
Speaker C:This webinar, the Way We Are, is trying to, you know, showcase the solutions providers that we think need to be showcased and it was a great find by you because the second thing that came across to me loud and clear was, you know, Ali knows what he's talking about.
Speaker C:He came across as very competent and very knowledgeable in the space, which is a space that I always say, you know, a lot more about than I do.
Speaker C:So.
Speaker C:But yeah, the way he, you know, the way he.
Speaker C:I love how he answered the one question too of like, okay, what, what are the key metrics that people are going to look at?
Speaker C:And he just knew that right off the top of his head.
Speaker C:And, and the bounce rate one was particularly interesting to me in terms of like, okay, you know, the retailers.
Speaker C:And the part for me being the retailer and the merchant too is like I always say this on our podcast, you have to be able to convert the traffic when it lands on your site from a Facebook or a TikTok ad.
Speaker C:Just because you're plugged in there doesn't mean you're going to do well.
Speaker C:And so the fact that the CPGs can now understand bounce rate to the degree that they want to, I think that's really interesting.
Speaker B:Yeah, I completely agree that that off site bit, which is getting more important, you know, more retail media companies are bungling off site into their offer, so better visibility through the transaction critical.
Speaker B:But I think the big thing that I'll take away.
Speaker B:I've been in conversations before where people have talked about the difference in how CPGs can act versus a D2C can act and somebody is cultural.
Speaker B:But I've never really understood the technical element of the data that a D2C can get to be able to, to optimize and why CPG can't get it.
Speaker B:And I think Ollie paints that picture really clearly.
Speaker B:And I think if I was sat there listening to it and if I was running an E comm operation at a cpg, I'd be thinking, yeah, I think I need to explore this one a bit further.
Speaker C:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:If I was at grocery shop and I was cpg, I'm like, okay, yeah, maybe, maybe I give Ollie a ping.
Speaker C:That's, that's what I, that's, that's what I would do.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:Chris.
Speaker B:Ollie mentioned he was going to be on stage on the Wednesday morning.
Speaker B:He's going to, to be part of the startup pitch competition.
Speaker B:So if you want to make sure you see more of ole and get to speak to him straight after, it's the pitch sessions that you should aim for.
