If you follow Particular Audience on Linkedin you’ve likely seen some of our recent updates about people, culture, marketing, and events... Perhaps you even follow us on TikTok, in which case you might have seen Rochelle in space trying to sell SaaS on socials!
Well, we’ve been up to quite a bit more than just that over the past few months.
Starting now, I will endeavor to use this channel as a medium to keep our partners, market, and community up to date with product at Particular Audience (PA).
My goal is to share a routine and open communication of what we’re releasing, what we’re working on, and what is coming up next. Today, I’ll share an update across 4 product areas we’ve rapidly iterated on over the past quarter, all contributing to our accelerated growth.
We’ve demystified search configuration for retailers
Since starting at PA, Search has been one of my favorite products to work on. The feedback I heard from the market was of a repetitive nature: getting search ‘right’ for eCommerce retailers is difficult and problematic. Anecdotes of how configuring some of the most advanced (and really awesome) search products is overly complex, resulting in underutilized technology that isn't performing as expected. Stories of many search products that over promise and under deliver.
None of this was news to me as I’ve experienced these challenges first hand while running an eCommerce business in the past. Search is one of the most complex but essential problems to solve in eCommerce; customers demand it, and if you can get it right the ability to convert these customers is 5x+ greater than others on site.
At PA we set out to fix this, building a product that can solve for some of the most advanced complexities of product search while being flexible, modular, and hands on, ‘simple’ enough for business users to understand. We’ve demystified the intimidation factor search configuration previously held on retailers, giving the ability to adjust advanced configuration in a market leading UI without making code level changes via our API.
Our newly released advanced settings manage for the complexities of catalog item data, accounting for edge cases across verticals that often present challenges for document retrieval. We’ve given more sophisticated control to our clients to manage query settings, merchandising within search results to align with business requirements.
Layered on top, personalized Search from PA takes the merchandising element of search to another level, using machine learning to tailor relevant results to each user query. Most eCommerce retailers struggle with the complexity of integrating and configuring personalized search, many completely unable to accomplish this. For our clients already using PA Recommendations, we’ve built personalized Search in a way that allows personalization to be quickly enabled and trained, without any additional configuration on their end.
Sounds simple enough, hey?
Our client AOV and UPT is growing rapidly
We’ve released our AI Bundles product, tapping into a real need in the market to maximize revenue and profitability per transaction. We’ve built and released new algorithms that have the highest confidence levels in product grouping, solving the ‘one click’ add to basket bundle problem. We’ve also experimented with different UI to deliver the most frictionless UX for increased UPT and AOV for our clients.
Price Beat is changing the pricing and CRO landscape
Dynamic or ‘smart’ pricing strategies continue to be a hot topic, and we’re leading the market with Price Beat powered by data from Similar Inc. Price Beat helps retailers dynamically price match or beat their competitors in real time. We’re building out the largest set of product pricing data, offering real time pricing services to retailers at scale.
Contextual Commerce is changing the product discovery landscape.
We’ve further developed Similar to help publishers automate eCommerce capabilities within content. Recommendations replace the need to search, changing the way in which consumers can discover and compare products in context to their browsing journey. Similar in an exciting new territory where B2C and B2B technology collide to better service the retailer, publisher, and consumer. Watch this space, more to come!
Monetize traffic on every website with PA Retail Media
US retail media ad spend is expected to reach $41 Billion in 2022 and BCG is forecasting the global retail media opportunity to be USD $100 Billion by 2025. These figures might even be conservative given the acceleration we’ve seen in retail media in the first half of 2022.
PA Retail Media is the 1st party data alternative for digital marketers, enabling brands to deliver measurable, relevant, and meaningful advertisements to customers along their shopping journey. We’re releasing PA Retail Media from alpha into beta with several clients launching their respective suppliers this quarter.
This is one of the most exciting SaaS products of the moment, shaking up digital marketing and empowering retailers to monetize their website traffic in new ways. Leveraging our market leading AI recommendations technology, our differentiation is the ability to intelligently weight the relevance of each product advertisement a consumer sees, taking a CX first approach whilst optimizing media spend for brands.
To the customer this feels relevant and trustworthy, to the supplier it's extremely efficient use of marketing budget, and the retailer profits off every click and sale, I reckon everyone wins!
What's next?
As a product team, we’re focused on releasing more personalized merchandising features in the second half of this year. Partnered with Stripe, payments will be simplified across Retail Media and the product will be packed with new targeting tactics and advanced collection builder UI, merging the best of Meta Commerce Manager and Google Adwords functionality for multi-brand retailers globally. The PA platform will receive significant client focused features and improvements and we’ll see some major changes across our Similar Chrome Extension available here.
