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Unlock item-level insights with Product Catalog

Product Catalog gives supplier brands access to item-level signals that show how consumers engage with specific products across participating retailers and commerce partners. By turning those signals into usable audiences, insights, and optimization inputs, advertisers can tailor messaging, measure product-level performance, and work toward improving campaign outcomes.

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Today’s consumers move fluidly between screens and stores, discovering products through connected TV (CTV), mobile, digital audio, and in‑store moments before deciding where and how to buy.

Consumers expect every touchpoint to be relevant, but brands often find the necessary data inaccessible. Without relevant data, it is difficult to build effective audience segments, tailor creative messaging, and understand which parts of your ad strategies drive sales.

Product Catalog can help close this gap by providing you access to item-level commerce signals, so you can understand how consumers engage with your products down to the SKU or UPC level. You can use these insights to tailor your messaging and measurement strategies.

Get to know the product:  

Introducing Product Catalog

Product Catalog enables commerce brands to share signals that show how consumers interact with specific products — down to the item level. Depending on the partner integration, those signals can include:

  • Keyword searches 

  • Product page views 

  • Add-to-cart and save-for-later events 

  • Purchases or bookings 

  • Quantity, frequency, and transaction value

These insights enable you to work from product-level behavior data and act on it in the same place you activate media: The Trade Desk platform.

Reach people based on what they actually buy: Your audience strategy is strengthened when it reflects real-world product behavior.

With Product Catalog, you can build audiences based on how people engage with products across retailers. That opens up more precise ways to grow your brand:

  • Reconnect with lapsed buyers 

  • Identify top buyers for new product launches 

  • Find consumers who consistently buy the brand across multiple retailers 

  • Use conversion signals as seeds to reach likely new buyers 

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For example

A snack brand is launching a win-back campaign. Instead of targeting a broad “snackers” segment, the media buying team could focus on people who bought a certain product six months ago. They could also target the brand’s top buyers to introduce a new flavor. The key is to start with the people who show the strongest interest, then expand the audience from there.

Tailor messaging across the full journey

Product Catalog captures interactions across the marketing funnel, making it easier for you to align creative messaging with consumer behavior. For example, a consumer who viewed a product page may need additional information, whereas someone who abandoned an item in their cart may need a well-timed reminder.

Sequencing like this can work across media channels. You can reinforce upper-funnel exposure from CTV or digital audio with lower-funnel display or mobile messaging, creating a more connected experience across devices.

Product Catalog also supports more product-specific creative decisions. For instance, if a consumer interacts with a specific item, the next message they see from the same brand can reflect that exact item, and on the screen they’re using. 

FYI

Product Catalog is designed to work with dynamic creative workflows as integrations with leading dynamic creative optimization (DCO) partners continue to expand.

See what’s driving sales, then optimize mid-flight 

Product Catalog helps connect media and sales to simplify measurement.

You can use item-level data to measure both online and in-store sales for specific products and understand halo effects across the broader portfolio. A campaign promoting a single product can also reveal whether it helped drive sales of adjacent items in the same product line.

This gives you a clearer view of:

  • Total sales 

  • Return on ad spend (ROAS) 

  • Performance by product 

  • Broader portfolio impact

These signals are available mid-flight, so you can use them to improve and optimize campaign performance in addition to measurement, with the option to let our platform AI, Koa, optimize automatically. 

FYI

The New Buyer Report, will be available from participating retailers soon and can help advertisers understand how campaigns may be contributing to household penetration and market share. Reach out to your representative at The Trade Desk for more information.

Put item-level data to work with AI

Product Catalog also supplies our platform AI, Koa, with better inputs.

When item-level conversion data is paired with Koa, campaigns can optimize toward the channels, audiences, and tactics that drive sales outcomes for specific products. Instead of relying on broad proxies, bidding decisions can reflect product-level performance and shift toward more valuable impressions in real time.

This can save you time from manual adjustments and give you more opportunities to reach consumers in prime moments. 

Build a closer connection to the people who buy your products

For brands that sell through retailers, direct access to item-level purchase data has often felt out of reach. Product Catalog changes that.

Advertisers can now see more clearly how consumers engage with products and use these insights for audience-building, messaging, measurement, and optimization, all in a self-serve UI. The result can be a more informed media strategy and a better chance to reach and grow with likely buyers. 

Ready to put item-level data to work in your next campaign? Contact us or reach out to your representative at The Trade Desk today to get started with Product Catalog. 

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.

Item-level data and the solutions described in this content are only available from retailers that have integrated with Product Catalog. Availability varies by market. Speak to your account representative to see who is available in your region today.