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volume 9 • spring 2016
at Discover Financial Services. Given its role as issuer, acquirer and network, Discover was in a somewhat unique position to build what Ronta describes as a robust merchant database.
“When data come through multiple acquirers, there are di erent standards and the data may be incomplete or inaccurate,” he says. For example, take a store that is owned by a parent brand, but the data that come through with a transaction doesn’t always distin- guish between the two or indicate
The Numbers
at which speci c retail location a purchase was made.
From Deals to Decisions
The data platform becomes even more powerful when working
in tandem with Discover Card’s merchant o ers program, Discover Deals. MDP’s database supports the audience selection portion
of these marketing campaigns, helping to narrow down the right cardmembers to which deals can be targeted.
“We put a lot of emphasis on
the cardmember experience.
We don’t want to bombard you with irrelevant o ers,” Ronta adds. “Research has shown us that, surprisingly, consumers are looking for convenience and relevancy as much as price and value. They want to know, ‘Is this o er relevant to me?’” That’s where MDP’s data come in to help create targeted, relevant deals for cardmembers,
as well as information about participating store locations. Beyond Discover Deals, Discover’s prepaid program partners are able to leverage the platform for in- sights and targeting related to their campaigns.
For merchants and marketers,
the exciting part is being able
to connect the digital o er or campaign to the ultimate purchase, Ronta says. “Merchants care about attribution and insights. They’re investing a lot in their o ers and they want con dence that their investment is paying o . We be- lieve there are great advantages
There’s a lot of payment data in
the industry, but
the data points aren’t always clean and organized to
be leveraged for digital ad attribution, which can create a challenge around linking consumer transactions to speci c merchants.
—Arvind Ronta, Discover Financial Services
to seeing the data end-to-end, and then leveraging it to the bene t of our cardmembers and our mer- chant partners,” he concludes.
Shopping-related searches on mobile jumped more than 120% year-over-year from 2014 to 2015, according to Google data.
Digital ad-spend represents about 30% of merchants’ advertising expenditures, but in-store sales account for almost 93% of the nearly $5 trillion in U.S. retail sales. By 2019, eMarketer estimates 9.8% of U.S. retail sales will be transacted online.
The inability to tie advertising exposure to sales is the No. 1 challenge in today’s mobile ecosystem, according to a 2015 report from Marchex and Digiday.
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