Onsite and offsite are both key channels for Ocado, and the online retailer has done much to push offsite to increase its ad reach for brands. Its offsite strategy is anchored in first-party, purchase-based audiences that can be activated across the open internet. Since 2023, a partnership with The Trade Desk lets advertisers use Ocado audience data to target and optimise across CTV and DOOH, with closed-loop attribution linked directly back to grocery outcomes.
However, a standout element of Ocado’s offsite strategy is how it works with publishers and more traditional media companies to leverage its customer data with mainstream media output.
Ocado’s real-time purchase signals are combined with premium publishers’ audience data to build high-intent segments that buyers can activate on the media publishers’ sites and apps. Launch partners include leading UK media companies Future plc, Immediate, The Independent and News UK – with Future citing stronger sales and ROI from pairing Aperture, its audience solution, with Ocado’s behavioural data.
This “go-where-the-buying-is” approach aims to reduce fragmentation by letting Ocado data flow into tools and
environments buyers already use. According to The Trade Desk, FMCG company Kimberly- Clark, for example, achieved a five-fold ROAS for a campaign for Andrex toilet tissue. While results vary by brand, this illustrates how sales-linked optimisation can outperform baseline plans. In comparison, Ad Tech Daily reports that during Ocado’s offsite rollout, smaller brands in the first wave reported 300-400% ROAS on average from sponsored placements – useful context for the lower-funnel power of Ocado’s owned inventory.
Ocado’s platform design, meanwhile, is deliberately interoperable: onsite media captures high-intent moments; offsite extends reach to premium publishers, social and CTV; and all of it is measured against the same first-party sales ‘truth’.
The network’s emphasis on self-serve and clean-room collaboration is meant to give buyers control without adding another walled garden. As eMarketer noted, Ocado’s strategy is to “go where media buying is already happening,” including DSPs and agency platforms, rather than forcing separate tools. This, given pureplay Ocado’s lack of instore, is proving to be a boon.
To learn more, download the RetailX Offsite data workbench report in association with Koddi, which takes Koddi’s survey data and RetailX consumer data to assess the trajectory of the offsite retail media sector, offering a data analysis, a deep dive into implications, a range of case studies and company profiles that show offsite in action and a boardroom brief and roadmap as to where to go next.
