Three CSS partners to kick-start your 2022 activity

The introduction of Google’s Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) partner program, following their infamous €2.4bn fine in 2017, opened up their platform for a wealth of comparison shopping sites to support retailers in driving higher sales, engaging with potential clients and generating visibility for brands. Thus allowing consumers to easily find the best product for the best price. 

As CSS partners continue to generate greater visibility and revenue for partnered advertisers from  Google Shopping and in some cases Bing. There now are over 50 CSS publishers on the Awin platform offering unique and intelligent solutions that do not interfere with inhouse activity. Last year, CSS partners doubled the revenue driven for advertisers across all verticals, and that figure continues to grow as we settle into 2022. 

If you want to understand more about how your brand can benefit from CSS activity via the Awin platform, get in touch here.  

With a range of partners partners to choose from, we speak to three partners to learn more about what each of these #AwinningPartnerships can offer Awin advertisers and to bust those common myths and misconceptions about CSS via the affiliate channel. 

Twenga supplements its merchant in-house campaign with their own bidding logic that focuses on surface opportunities in the long tail catalogue. An optional pixel optimises its campaign. 

Klarna is a well-known and recognisable buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) brand which uses CSS as one of the services as part of their publisher solution. Find out more here. 

Shareight is integrated and closely working with several large mass media titles where they combine the awareness (content) phase together with the conversion (shopping) phase. 

Twenga 

Could you please briefly introduce Twenga? 

Jose Lorenzo, Head of Business Development 

Twenga has been working with Awin for more than six years and has successfully partnered with more than200 advertisers across Australia, Europe, North America, and the UK. Twenga is a machine learning platform that supplements its clients’ Google, Bing and Petal Shopping Ads strategy thanks to its expertise and a variety of top-notch services and tools. We’re Google Premium and Microsoft Select Partners. From our office in central Paris, we service nearly 4,000 clients in 16 countries in Europe, North America, and Australia.  

As a CSS partner what problem or challenge do you solve for brands, and why should they partner with you? 

We drive incremental sales to our clients thanks to our supplementary bidding logic. No matter if they rely on automatic solutions, have their own or are working with other CSS providers, our algorithm surfaces opportunities in the long-tail part of the catalogue that haven’t been tapped into before. We have the capability to predict conversion rates and basket values at an item level, which allows us to bid at the optimal value. This way, we maximise the quality traffic acquisition under budget constraints.  

What's unique about your CSS offering? 

Twenga is the only self-managed CSS in the market that also operates as a Tech provider. We’ve developed a proprietary pixel that allows us to obtain a stronger signal from our clients improving their performance twofold. 

Rather than operate in isolation to an advertiser’s other acquisition channels, Twenga’s pixel fetches signals from multiple internal and external sources which allows us to collect more data for a smarter exploration, target new segments of users and have a better understanding of the overall strategy. It’s an efficient and scalable technology that improves the general ROI with no additional cost associated, and takes a 100% item-centric approach, with no user level data being collected.  

Integrating with Twenga is simple; the merchant needs a product feed with Google format and to make sure the Paid Search team is aware that Twenga ads will be displayed alongside theirs. Integrations can be carried out directly by the Awin team via the MasterTag, with our available template for Google Tag Manager or directly scripting it into the client’s property. Simply by integrating our pixel, we will be able to obtain a much stronger signal to bid more accurately and improve our exploration process, potentially driving x2 performance than without the pixel. Your Awin Account Manager is already instructed on how to implement it, you don’t need to do anything. 

Klarna 

Could you please briefly introduce Klarna? 

Lucy Wells, Marketing Manager at Klarna 

Klarna joined Awin more than a year ago but already showed tremendous growth, partnering with around 800 advertisers in the UK, US, DACH, ES, IT and FR regions. You can learn more about partnering with us in another article feature here. 

As part of an expanding suite of media services, Klarna offers a self-serve CSS hosting solution for merchant’s Product Listing Ad (PLA) activity across Google platforms, to help merchants get more for their ad spend, drive customer reach and product visibility. Klarna has embarked on a journey from being a pure global bank and payments provider to becoming a full-blown shopping service brand and the ultimate growth partner for merchants of all sizes. As such, Klarna is creating a broad range of advertising services to support our merchants’ business.  

As a CSS partner what problem or challenge do you solve for brands, and why should they partner with you? 

Klarna CSS helps merchants to boost their product reach and drive traffic from new in-market customers seeking the best product and price to match their enquiry, with additional visibility gained on the premium Klarna comparison shopping site css.klarna.com. Klarna CSS enables merchants to lower their Cost Per Click (CPC), maximise their Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and increase traffic at a given budget. To partner with Klarna there are no additional requirements needed. Just simply apply to the 'hosting solution' and someone from the Klarna team will reach out. 

Merchants can leverage this positive association with the recognisable Klarna brand name on their Product Listing Ads to garner and attract consumers searching on Google platforms. Klarna merchants have seen a 5% increase in their Click Through Rate when switching to Klarna CSS and having PLAs published with the ‘By Klarna’ label.  

Shareight 

Could you please briefly introduce Shareight? 

Hugh Hammond, Business Development Manager 

Shareight has been active on Awin for eight years, partnering with more than 500 advertisers in the UK, looking to expand to more territories in 2022. 

We’re a marketing solutions company that specialise  in the consideration phase of the customer journey: those crucial, but often neglected moments, when consumers are exploring and evaluating. Our solutions sit between awareness-generating advertising and discount-driven performance marketing to keep our clients' product  or service on the consumer’s shortlist as they move towards a purchase. 

  As a CSS partner what problem or challenge do you solve for brands, and why should they partner with you? 

We speak to a lot of brands and agencies. And we’ve learned that they tend to focus their marketing activity at each end of the customer journey - on branding to create awareness at the start, then performance marketing to complete conversions at the end. 

But this presents a challenge, because there’s an important stage in the middle, the consideration phase, where customers explore and evaluate; this is when they actually decide which brand or product they’re going to buy. And because brands are largely absent during this crucial phase, this is where we focus our attention. 

  We solve the problem in three stages:   

• Our network of Shopping Portals helps customers browse and discover our client brands.
• High quality editorial content on premium publishers (eg Grazia, Mirror, MailOnline) creates preference for those brands.
• And our CSS activity makes it easy to select the brand.

What’s unique about your CSS offering?

As well as offering the usual CSS benefits of incremental sales, improved market share and payment on CPA, there are three specific things that make our offering unique: 

1. Our CSS operates on a premium partner network - Our broad network of premium publisher, digital shopping portals (including our own, Octer) ensures the right brand alignment for advertisers in a channel that has massive visibility.

2. We offer CSS together with Premium Content, on a single CPA - Our integrated solution helps to deliver the brand’s KPIs for both CSS (traffic and revenue) and Content (views, dwell time, CTR and new customers), all on a single CPA.

3. We combine CSS with other products to deliver better results - As we offer a suite of products, rather than CSS on its own, we can design a solution to boost a brand’s CSS results.

There are no specific integration requirements to join Shareight. We operate on a tiered system to ensure all advertisers get the maximum return with the minimum risk. The base level is a free trial on at least one of our shopping or CSS partners. Our highest level is a strategic partnership across multiple titles designed to deliver all KPIs. Existing strategic partners testify to over £1m in sales, half a million clicks, and several thousand new customers, as well as regular bespoke Content to hit their KPIs, all on a CPA. 

Could you tell us three common myths or misconceptions about CSS you've dealt with in recent times? 

 Twenga: “Cannibalisation” 

The way Google designed the CSS business prevents any sort of conflict with a client’s in-house campaign and benefit running multiple CSS campaigns. The product will be displayed only once in the Shopping Units and all the bidding from that specific product will be considered as from only one CSS. The CPC will be determined by the first losing bid from a different merchant. Please, don’t take our word for it, you can read more on Google’s official documentation. 

 Klarna: “If we change CSS providers we lose our campaigns and performance history” 

With Klarna CSS, the merchant will retain full access and control over their Google Merchant Center, their campaign set-up and data. Importantly, ‘switching’ refers to a back-end type switch of association, and so no changes occur to existing campaigns. Merchants can log-in as usual, retain all their settings but enjoy boosted performance from utilizing the full spend of their ad budget with Klarna. 

 Shareight: “We already work with one CSS partner, so why work with another?” 

Working with Shareight has two great benefits - to gain incremental revenue and grow market share, even where the brand has an existing relationship. Awin themselves have a great article on this where they show that advertisers with two CSS partners delivered 2.5x the additional growth in 2020 vs advertisers with only one CSS partner. Shareight is not just a CSS supplier. We work closely with our client brands as a strategic partner, aligning our offering to their objectives. They benefit from working with an established business that delivers marketing solutions throughout the consideration phase of the customer journey.  

To learn more about Awin’s CSS #AwinningPartnerships and how you can accelerate your affiliate activity on our platform, let us know you’re interested here.