Topsort Banner Ads: Now Smoother and More Coherent Than Ever

Topsort’s vision is to let you launch, scale, and optimize your ad platform on your terms, intelligently. We understand that each marketplace is unique and our ad formats can be configured to help you build an ad experience that fits perfectly into your business dynamics.

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That doesn’t stop us from improving the experiences to give you stronger and more flexible tools.

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We are excited to announce the launch of our new and improved banner ads experience. This revamp was driven by our commitment to providing you with a streamlined and intuitive platform to manage your banner ads.

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We’d like to explain why we decided to redefine the banner ads experience for retail media in the first place. If you want to jump to the product update details, just scroll down a little bit.

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Retail Media Banner Ads: Great potential with many challenges

Banner ads have been one of the most popular ad formats, but we can say they have been poorly used for decades and got notoriety because of cookie-based retargeting. With the rise of Retail Media banner ads, they seem to get their popularity back.

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But the way banner ads have been being leveraged, created challenges for their use with retail media.

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Relevance

Sponsored listings as the core format of auction-based ads have been the gold mine for marketplaces because they are relevant and don’t bother the users.

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Retail media banner ads, on the other hand, had the relevance issue. Category pages, search result pages, and other high-intent pages would benefit from relevant banners. But nobody likes to see the banner of “men’s boots” on the beachwear category page.

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This can be managed by marketplace admins by manually checking each banner and advertiser, which brings us to scalability issues.

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Scalability

What about when you have hundreds of vendors and hundreds of categories? How can you ensure all banner ads are relevant? Let’s add banners on search result pages to make it more complicated.

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How many people do you need in your management team to manage these thousands of variations?

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And even if you do, how can you price a banner that shows up when people search for “Valentine's day gifts for wife” during a peak season vs a banner ad on the gifts category page on any random weekend?

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Fixed prices can result in overpricing of the banners that result in unhappy vendors or underpricing that results in loss of ad revenue.  And, this is the 3rd challenge with retail media banner ads.

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Pricing

Marketplaces, retailers, and delivery apps are dynamic businesses. Each vendor and brand have different goals and budgets. The snacks category becomes more valuable during the World Cup finals than on Monday afternoons. Just to make pricing more complicated, there are also brands who want to improve their visibility on certain pages by showing a banner for a whole month.

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CPM, bids, or exclusive prices make the whole thing complicated. You might need a long spreadsheet to keep track of them. And don’t forget to report the results.

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When we launched our banner ads format, we addressed all of these solutions by combining auction-based high-visibility and mobile-friendly banner ads with a fully-configurable workflow.

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We turned a poorly used ad format into a premium offering.

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From working with many marketplaces, retailers, and delivery apps, we’ve also learned that each business has different dynamics and wants to create a banner ads experience that fits their businesses.

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They wanted more configuration with their retail media banner ads, easier management, and precise targeting. They also wanted to be able to have absolute control over their banner placements to offer exclusivity and fixed tenancy.

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Introducing Better, Faster, and More Configurable Banner Ads

Our smoother and more coherent new banner ads experience comes with improvements in three core areas: Configuration, Campaign Creation, and Targeting

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Configuration

You can create banner ads for search, category, and landing pages. With these 3 types of banner placements, you can serve banner ads for the entire user journey on your website or app. Now, you don’t need to spend time with Search and Category page banner ad slots because we got them configured for you. There is just one slot for category pages, and one slot for search results pages.

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Instead, you can define landing page placements, but faster.

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Your homepage, and the other high-value and specific pages that act as landing pages are perfect for banner ads dueto their high traffic. Using our intuitive UI, you can define as many placements as your want, like adding new rows to a spreadsheet.

You can create banner slots for multiple landing pages and even multiple banners for a single page. At any point, you can delete a configuration or add a new one. If you have a long list of pages and banner slots, consider bulk uploading the configuration.

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Campaign Creation & Management

We added new entry points to the campaign creation flow and improved the flow by adding more features.

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Now, as an admin, you can create banner ads campaigns directly on the configuration page. You can still visit the vendor page and launch a banner ads campaign. This new flow saves you time by letting you create banner ads campaigns for vendors (even multiple vendors) easily. You can promote a vendor, a product, or a URL.

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For faster campaign creation, use the “Create Banner” button or pick a slot from the list. Now, for each banner ad slot, you can upload different creatives for mobile and desktop, or crop one image to fit both.

Before launching your campaign, you can set a maximum CPM or turn autobidding on to maximize the results. By adding bidding to the banner ads, you can let multiple brands and vendors compete for that spot; bringing your banner ads to their true value and boosting your revenues. Both for autobidding and maximum CPM, you can set different daily budgets per desktop and mobile.

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On the Banner Ads Overview page, you can see all your configurations, as well as the performance of each slot. You can see the number of bids, impressions, and CPM for any date.

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Targeting

We implemented new targeting features to create a relevant experience for your visitors and premium ad formats for your vendors and brands. For landing page banners, the targeting is built in. By creating exclusive banner slots for each landing page, you are creating a premium placement for visitors to those pages. You can drive the traffic from banners to a product, vendor, or URL.

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For category and search result pages, you can target certain categories, keywords, and locations. Combine these targeting options to create banner ads campaigns to reach your desired audience with precision.

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Exclusivity and Fixed Tenancy

One of the most common requests we were receiving from our partners was about the fixed tenancy. Brands and vendors like to be shown on a certain category or landing page. With our recent update, you can create exclusive banners with a click of a button. When marked as exclusive, that banner slot will only be available to the vendors you pick and others can not enter the auctions for that spot during the exclusivity period.

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To make a banner exclusive, simply select Exclusive from “Bidding or Exclusive” dropdown on the last step of campaign creation and set the start and end dates of the exclusivity or tenancy period.

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It’s time to leverage banner ads to give your brands and vendors a chance to promote their brands and products while boosting your ad revenue.

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Have a question? Want to see our new banner ads flow in action? Let's talk

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