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Winning with Roundel Media Studio: Strategies for Success

Our retail media experts share tips for harnessing the full power of Target’s new ad platform.

Retail media ad spend continues to grow, given the attractiveness of retailers’ first party data and increasingly sophisticated ad products. Target is among the many retailers we work with in our commerce media practice, so we were excited to experience the latest incarnation of Target’s self-service retail media platform, Roundel Media Studio.

The platform experienced double-digit growth from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024, bolstered by the rich shopper insights gained through its Target Circle loyalty program.  It offers advertisers a seamless way to activate, manage, and analyze Target Product Ads (TPA), sponsored product ad placements on Target.com and the Target app, leveraging rich first-party data to deliver shopper-centric brand building opportunities and maximum performance.  
Here are some tips for winning on Roundel Media Studio.

Know Your Bidding Tactics

To maximize efficiency and drive advertising sales, it’s crucial to understand the bidding tactics available on Roundel Media Studio.  We’ve seen success using the following approach:

  • Set the line-item optimizer to Revenue for conversion, clicks or revenue, depending on your campaign’s overall goal.
  • Set a CPC cap to ensure your bid doesn’t exceed the maximum amount you wish to pay. The CPC cap should be at least 30% above the minimum bid to allow the engine to optimize effectively.
  • Optimize bids competitively to balance scale and performance targets across both keyword and item-level bids.
  • Adopt additional optimization levers like placement bid modifiers, increasing bids on best-performing placements.
  • Leverage a 3rd-party bidding platform via API to unlock additional features like dayparting.

Utilize First-Party Data

Roundel Media Studio leverages first-party data from both in-store and online shoppers, providing rich insights from over 165M Target guests. Use this data to target current, lapsed, and or look-alike shopper segments and tailor messaging accordingly.

Complement TPA with Off-site Placements

Programmatic by Roundel™ allows brands to create custom audiences and reach them on brand-safe inventory off-site using real-time bidding and a demand-side platform of the marketer’s choice. This feature complements Roundel Media Studio by providing additional targeting options and the opportunity to reach shoppers across over 50 premium publisher partners through Bullseye Marketplace.

Experiment with Shoppable CTV

CTV by Roundel™ allows brands to motivate TV viewers to action with its non-skip, shoppable creative formats. 91% of Target guests subscribe to streaming TV, so this is a great audience to experiment with newer shopping formats.  CTV by Roundel™ allows viewers to scan a QR code and add products directly to their cart for purchase.

Conclusion

Roundel Media Studio offers innovative self-service tools and insights to drive sales through Target Product Ads campaigns. When paired with Target’s full suite of ad products – which includes display, programmatic, CTV, YouTube, search, social and influencers – it can help grow your reach and connectivity with Target guests.

Need help planning your Target retail media buy or maximizing your return on investment? Drop us a line – we have a deep bench of retail media experts eager to talk shop.