Christmas in July — preparing for holiday activations with our new suite of e-commerce products

The Trade Desk is excited to announce our new suite of products that allow e-commerce advertisers to upload their entire catalog directly into our platform and connect digital touchpoints to online sales at the SKU level.


Though it’s only July, proper media activation requires methodical planning well in advance of the holiday madness. As you look for innovative ways to get even more out of your media spend this year, you should consider leveraging more data to drive campaign performance.

For a retailer, having the best data often translates to website or app sales. With nearly 1 in 4 holiday shoppers choosing to make their purchases online,1 you need to be able to track sales and other activities on your e-commerce properties. But when you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs, tracking and managing granular data sets can be next to impossible.

Luckily, Christmas is coming early this year — The Trade Desk is excited to announce our new suite of products for e-commerce advertisers:

  • Conversion Events API: Track user actions on your site or app as they move down the purchase funnel to segment users at the category, brand, and even SKU level in real time.
  • Product Catalog: Upload your entire product catalog directly into our platform to connect digital touchpoints to online sales at the SKU level.
  • Custom ROAS: Understand how your campaigns are driving conversions and see the “halo effect” of one campaign driving sales for multiple related products.

So, how can you use all these solutions together?

Let’s say you’re an apparel brand promoting a new line of winter coats. You can use Conversion Events API to segment out the customer journey, from viewing the product all the way to purchasing. Then use Product Catalog to build audiences of users who have bought certain SKUs, or who added those SKUs to their cart. Attribute the campaign to those outcomes and use our tools to help understand how your media spend is driving winter coat sales, then consider using Custom ROAS to include scarves and hats to see the halo effect of your campaign on driving sales of related products.

How it works:


STEP 1

Use our Conversion Events API to capture user activity on your site or apps across multiple events, such as “view SKU,” “add to cart,” “save for later,” and “purchase.”

STEP 2
Upload and manage your entire product catalog to our platform using the Product Catalog API in real time. If you prefer to do a one-time upload via Excel or CSV file, your representative at The Trade Desk can help.

STEP 3
Build “itemsets” in The Trade Desk platform to curate products that are relevant to your campaign. The itemsets help create retargeting segments and/or set up campaign attribution for specific SKU sales. Going back to the winter coat example, you can create an itemset that includes the corresponding SKUs for all your selected items.

STEP 4
Target users with your itemsets. With each itemset you build, four audiences are automatically created: itemset_event x 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, and 3 months. These can be used to target users within those lookback windows. No refreshing is needed, and if the itemset is updated, the audience will auto-update as well.

STEP 5
Share your product catalog details, including itemsets with curated SKUs, with any of our DCO partners (Clinch, Innovid, Flashtalking, and Jivox) to implement a strategy that makes sense for your campaign. For example, showing parkas to people in Colorado and peacoats to people in New York.

STEP 6
Use Custom ROAS to attribute conversions for related products. For example, if you’re trying to drive coat sales and someone also buys a scarf, you can include both purchases in your ROAS calculation.

To learn more or get started, reach out to your account manager at The Trade Desk today.

1. Jessica Young, “Online Holiday Sales Grow a More Muted 10% in 2021,” Digital Commerce 360, January 20, 2022, https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/online-holiday-sales/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20ecommerce%20accounted%20for,the%2019.2%25%20registered%20in%202019.