ANALYSIS Showrooming, webrooming, ROPO and ROPES: how Boots, Criteo and Live Ramp are solving a perennial retail media challenge

UK health and beauty retailer Boots made a recent announcement about how they were working with Criteo and LiveRamp to show the true omnichannel impact of advertising on Boots.com. As omnichannel behaviour among consumers increases, it is a challenge for retail media networks to show insights into shopper journeys.

Boots is leveraging its extensive first-party data from its Advantage Card alongside its online and offline sales data. By connecting datasets, they can track whether shoppers research products online before purchasing them in-store, enabling more accurate attribution of ROAS (return on advertising spend).

This initiative from Boots, Criteo and Liveramp addresses shopper trends that have emerged over the past decade with the growth of digital commerce:

• Showrooming is the trend in shopping behaviour where consumers visit physical stores to touch and feel the products but opt to purchase them online.
• When consumers research products online before purchasing them in-store (also known as ROPO: Research Online, Purchase Offline).

“Showrooming” and “webrooming” create a real challenge for both retailers and advertisers: as traditional metrics often overlook the ROPO effect. Most current measurement models focus only on on-site purchases, ignoring the insights webrooming provides about subsequent off-site behaviour.

Quantifying the extent of off-site purchase behaviour allows both retailers and advertisers to better understand the impact of their retail media ads, allocate media budgets effectively, and make informed brand growth decisions. Solving the ROPO challenge is critical for maximising the value of retail media.

This is why solving the “ROPO” challenge is key to the success of retail media.  Luckily, there is now data from Boots and Amazon to show the real impact of ROPO on advertising.

ROPO results from initial Boots, Criteo and LiveRamp

Boots sought to answer key questions about shopper behaviour. As Oliver Klander, Commercial Director of LiveRamp, explains:

• Did a shopper who saw an ad on Boots.com convert?
• Was the shopper also targeted in an off-site campaign?
• Was the shopper targeted through a programmatic ad on the wider web?

Ollie Shayer, Omni-Media Director for Boots explains how they solved the challenge: “We wanted to bring together Boots, Criteo and Liveramp to connect the data so that we can see customers who’ve seen sponsored ads on site and then purchased in store and look at that shopper behaviour across categories. The next stage of that is to apply the targeting based on the ad behaviour as well.”

Andy Stephen’s of Criteo explained how they approached the challenge: “We are connecting dots between advertising engagements online (e.g. impressions, clicks) and purchased SKUs at an individual shopper level across online and offline channels. This allows us to measure the impact (for example, the ROPO effect) of digital ad campaigns on in-store sales. Brands can – at a campaign level – apply their preferred flexible attribution window to measure this over time (up to 30 days post engagement) at individual product level but also across brand and category halos. Thanks to the first-party data match between user online and in-store, the metrics are precise and measured, instead of modelled across test-control groups of users. This offers a broad range of opportunities to further build and improve audience segments leveraging newly discovered omni-channel customer insights.”.

Initial results showed a 22% uplift in ROAS when integrating online and offline sales data, compared to online-only analysis. This analysis covered the top 50 brands advertising on Boots.com from mid-September to mid-October 2024.

Retail media and ROPO results from Amazon

Boots is not alone in tackling the ROPO challenge. There are lots of peer reviewed papers in marketing journals on the impact of Retail Media and the ROPO effect. For example, Professor Koen Pauwels, Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University in Boston, has written and collaborated on numerous papers on the topic. 

Professor Pauwels points out that retail media offers two important benefits to marketers:

• Discovery and decision mode: Consumers visiting retail websites are actively considering purchases, unlike users on social media or search platforms.
• Full-funnel data: Retail media facilitates the integration of consumer behaviour across multiple ad exposures, turning the traditional ‘funnel’ into a ‘cylinder’ of conversion.

In a study for the International Journal of Research in Marketing snappily titled “The effectiveness of different forms of online advertising for purchase conversion in a multiple-channel attribution framework” Professor Pauwels observed that:

• Retail media ads are more likely to be ‘content-integrated’, for example directly related to the main objective of the website’s user.
• In contrast, many non-retail media ads tend to be ‘content-separated’, i.e. they do not correspond to the user’s main objective, which could be checking sports results, getting news, or connecting with friends and family.

Professor Pauwels demonstrated that content-integrated ads on retail media platforms are three times more effective at driving purchases than content-separated ads.

ROPO research: ROPES and the Amplifier Ratio

In a paper called “Amplifying Off-Site Purchases with On-Site Advertising”, Pauwels and his colleagues introduced two key metrics to measure ROPO. They combined Amazon internal data from customers’ browsing behaviour on Amazon.com and matched these with survey responses for the same customers about their offsite behaviour across twelve product categories.

Professor Pauwels and his colleagues created two brand-level measures to quantify the magnitude of off-site purchases among on-site researchers: Research on-site purchases elsewhere share (ROPES) and Amplifier Ratio (AR). 

• ROPES (Research On-site, Purchase Elsewhere Share): The ratio of off-site buyers to on-site researchers within a category.
• Amplifier Ratio (AR): A proxy for amplifying ROAS by comparing on-site purchases to off-site purchases within the same category.

Professor Pauwels’ research was based on serious data sizes: they collected survey responses of 41,946 Amazon customers across ten categories in 2021 (Audio Speakers, Computer Printers, Doll Toys, Laptop Computers, Microwaves, Power Drills, Running Shoes, Smartphones, Tablet Computers, and Televisions).  

Their papers showed that ROPO is “economically substantial”.  Among the consumers who researched a product on Amazon, more end up buying it off-Amazon than on-Amazon – in every analysed category. In other words, off-site purchases often exceeded on-site purchases, with ROPES varying from 0.5% to 10% across categories. Doll toys, printers, and running shoes had higher ROPES than laptops or smartphones.

Moreover, consumers who visit more product pages (PDPs), click more and spend a longer time on the product’s Amazon page, are more likely to buy the product, both on and off Amazon.

Upper funnel advertising ROPO

Professor Pauwels and his colleagues found that upper funnel advertising like Display Ads, Video Ads or Sponsored Display ads tends to have a relatively larger share of off-site sales contribution relative to lower funnel advertising like Sponsored Products advertising that affects mainly on-site sales

They also found that always-on advertising strategies on Amazon showed greater impact on off-site purchase behaviour compared to time-limited campaigns.

ROPO implications

So, what should we take on all of this real-world, peer-review data as well as the Boots announcement? 

There are seven takeaways here:

1. ROPO is measurable and important: ROPO is significant for understanding the full impact of retail media not only on Amazon but also sites like Boots.com.
2. Attribution models and data ingestion capabilities at campaign level can show that including online-only sales and offline sales improves ROAS.
3. Amplification effects of media campaigns extend beyond the initial channel, influencing broader purchase behaviour.
4. There are sizable contributions of off-Amazon sales of 16%–44% for the different ad products across brands.
5. Upper-funnel and always-on campaigns drive greater off-site purchase contributions
6. “Always-on” spending reaches consumers at any stage in the customer journey whereas ‘bursting’ ads at certain points in time limits the number of potential customers the brand can interact with,
7. Retail media sites act as major “billboards” for off-site purchases, amplifying brand presence and driving cross-channel results

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/webrooming-how-amplify-online-ads-prof-dr-koen-pauwels

https://marketingandmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-effectiveness-of-different-forms-of-online-advertising-for-purchase-conversion-in-a-multiple-channel-attribution-framework.pdf