Nielsen teams with e-commerce giant JD.com to track online shopping journey

The deal also sees the launch of the Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) tool, which aims to bring clarity and transparency to China’s complex and fragmented digital media landscape.

Vishal Bali, managing director of Nielsen China, told The Drum, the deal would transform and upgrade the retail industry.

“What it brings to the industry is that it is the first time on a scale of large population, way beyond panel analysis, that we can connect ‘watch and buy’ at a shopper level across a wide spectrum of media options and platforms. It brings direct, unbiased, accurate, more complete and granular insights into the industry, in terms of device-linked shopper media consumption and buying behaviour. This connection is what everybody wants, and by partnering up with JD, we made it.”

“There is no other player in the market that has this good quality of data with massive coverage of internet population,” added Bali.

Bali is confident the partnership will help to solve the attribution puzzle and enable brands to see exactly what is driving sales in China.

“The increased fragmentation of online media has created a landscape where consumers are seeing and clicking on hundreds of touch points before they make a purchase. For brands that are trying to measure and optimise their online marketing ROI, this is a massive problem that previous analytics platforms have been unable to solve effectively.

“The joint offering will help advertisers and JD to see through how different media and touch points, in and out of JD, interact with each other from a consumer perspective, and then optimise the plan to more efficiently allocate advertising and marketing budgets to increase their ROI.

“Instead of looking at just that last click before purchase, the Nielsen-JD.com MTA offering allows us to track the full online shopping path and then leverage the most effective touch points for better engagement with the consumer.”

However, media fragmentation, siloed data and the lack of unified standards and measurement systems are just some of the obstacles that continue to make the attribution process challenging.

“More often than not consumers are getting exposed to multiple different media platforms and hundreds of touch points depending on their own media habits and lifestyles. In order to get the complete picture, we need pull the data out of its silos and connect them together,” said Bali.

“The effect of digital media varies significantly among brands and categories. For example, digital media contributes 42% in cosmetic industry, but only 11% in baby diapers. What worked before doesn’t guarantee the same success. It keeps marketers thinking about what else they need to look at behind those touch points to understand the mechanics. The questions are, what standards do we use and what do we need to look at beyond traffic, impression, and click-through rate.”

Bali said the joint MTA aims to lift the lid on some of the underlying drivers behind ROI numbers to give brands a better idea of what is driving their sales.

“Only by doing so, the advertisers can correctly evaluate the marketing results, and then optimize the formulation and implementation of marketing plans, and ultimately increase the advertiser's ROI ratio,” said Bali.