A day in the life of a Lead eCommerce Media Planner at a holding agency managing a major CPG brand.

The Importance of eCommerce to Your Lead eCommerce Media Planners

For modern retail businesses, eCommerce is a game changer. Lead Media Planners use eCommerce to reach new customers and broaden the reach of their brands. Plus, eCommerce is great at encouraging loyalty, as it helps brands connect (and reconnect) with their customers across high-traffic channels built for customer convenience.

This article details the specific responsibilities your eCommerce Media Planners tackle daily, the teams they work with most closely, and the metrics that matter most to them.

About the Role

Lead eCommerce Media Planners manage a media strategy team that oversees the media planning and buying for their clients’ eCommerce businesses with the primary goal of delivering the right ads in the right place at the right time. Their team is focused on eCommerce and Retail Media advertising, where a large portion of the company’s overarching budget is spent and continues to move, given the ever-changing online landscape.

Their day-to-day varies greatly, shifting from finding the top personas on Amazon for one of their brands to building a connected TV strategy for another brand.

This can include tasks such as:

• Researching and analyzing consumer data and market trends to inform media strategy.
• Developing and implementing media plans that align with clients' goals and objectives.
• Managing and monitoring campaigns to ensure they are delivering desired results.
• Communicating with clients to provide updates and insights on campaign performance.
• Staying up to date with the latest industry trends and advertising technology best practices to improve campaign effectiveness.

Teams They Work With

Lead eCommerce Media Planners work closely with many departments, including your:

• Creative department—ensuring ads are messaged correctly for various audiences being targeted.
• Retailer teams—helping guide best practices across selling platforms and discovering new optimizations to get more out of every ad dollar.
• Brand teams—helping plan strategies that align with core principles and messaging.
• Amazon representatives—discussing new implementations and features, like Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP).

These regular collaborations not only help eCommerce Media Planners set up campaigns for success, but it gives them invaluable expertise that compounds over time.

The Top Metrics to Care Most About

Lead eCommerce Media Planners know that it’s essential to customize the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets based on their brand’s campaign goals. They focus on different KPIs for different brands and campaigns, but below are a few that regularly tops the list in terms of importance:

• Share of Voice: SOV measures their brand’s piece of the pie and if their ads are improving brand reach. If this metric isn’t growing, they’re not doing their job effectively!
• NTB / HHP (New-to-brand / Household Penetration): This measures if they’re reaching incremental customers instead of targeting those already familiar with their brands. If incrementality is low, then they’re probably wasting advertising dollars.
• Engagement (CTR, DPVr, etc.): These metrics measure if their ads are being shown to relevant audiences that are engaging with the brands they’re promoting. If engagement is low, they know something is wrong and can pivot their strategy.
• Efficiency (ROAS, ACOS, etc.): These metrics measure whether they’re effectively using the budget provided for each brand, specifically whether ad placements are driving sales or simply burning through the budget.

The Top Metrics Upper Management Cares About

As we’ve covered in previous articles in the series, influential eCommerce leaders manage down on the metric success with cross-functional teams and communicate up, reporting on crucial wins for upper management.

Key metrics, like revenue, profitability, market share, and incrementality, are essential for eCommerce Directors and their C-Suite leaders, but each role views these metrics differently.

Here’s a look at what metrics Lead eCommerce Media Planners report to their bosses:

• Revenue: Everything ties back to revenue! The purpose of reaching new customers and growing their brand’s share is to increase sales and revenue eventually.  
• Profitability: With rising advertising costs across the digital world and increased costs for manufacturing, shipping, etc., their leadership cares more and more about how their strategies result in profitable sales for the company.  
• Market Share: If they’re not gaining share, their competition is! This all ties back into revenue growth because the more market share their brand gains, the easier it is to grow revenue and maintain that growth in a sustainable way over long periods.
• Incrementality: Each customer only has so much lifetime value (LTV). If they’re not reaching new customers, they will only grow along with the LTV of their existing customer base. This is highly limiting, so incrementality is on the minds of all teams within the organization.

How eCommerce Leaders Take Action to Drive Better Metrics

Lead eCommerce Media Planners and their teams are constantly testing and learning. They test new strategies on existing platforms, such as implementing new automation and/or AB testing various creative formats. Along with this, they’re often buying advertising through new retail partners to expand reach for each of their brands. This helps them grow sales efficiently and to find incrementality through new strategies.

How eCommerce Leaders Leverage Amazon DSP to Drive Incremental Sales

Lead eCommerce Media Planners use Amazon's Demand Side Platform to purchase and manage digital advertising campaigns across various channels, including display, video, and audio. They use DSP to target specific audiences, optimize ad delivery, and track performance metrics. Their teams leverage Amazon DSP audiences to boost incremental sales by utilizing its advanced targeting capabilities, such as audience segmentation and retargeting.  

They can also use these audiences to target existing customers to encourage loyalty or to cross-sell across their product portfolio. By utilizing Amazon DSP, Lead eCommerce Media Planners can ensure they're building a full-funnel campaign that will effectively reach their set goals.

How eCommerce Leaders Use Pacvue to Get Ahead

We’ve seen Lead eCommerce Media Planners using Pacvue leverage the following tools to meet their campaign goals, such as:

• Dayparting and Budget Pacing: These tools ensure that they use their ad spend at peak times when their customers are shopping.    
• Automated Rules: These tools enable advertisers to automate campaign adjustments that their team would otherwise have to implement manually. These are available across both Amazon Sponsored Ads and DSP.
• Advanced Reporting: This feature allows teams to build further or expand their strategies. For example, they usually connect to Pacvue’s Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) dashboard to connect their Amazon advertising efforts across both Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP. By doing this, eCommerce leaders unlock mixed attribution data that shows where they need to invest more in their upper funnel tactics, such as Lifestyle targeting through DSP, unlocking the ability for incremental growth and long-term sustainability.

Interested in finding efficiencies that would otherwise require hours of manual work for your team?

Contact us today, and we’ll show you how Pacvue can unlock several opportunities to drive incremental sales for your business.