Constructor, the leading AI-powered search and product discovery platform for enterprise ecommerce companies, announced its Retail Media Suite. This includes Sponsored Listings, an offering that dramatically improves retail media performance by making online ads more attractive to each shopper. Now, retailers can serve personalized ads — integrated within search results, browse experiences and product recommendations — that learn from shopper interactions and complement (rather than compete with) organic placements. The result: dramatically higher engagement and revenue, without disrupting the shopper journey.
Retail media — or advertising on a retailer’s properties, such as their website or mobile app — has become a critical revenue driver in ecommerce, with global retail media spending projected to reach $165 billion this year. As brands seek to place ads where customers already are, Constructor has the data and technology to ensure the right placements reach the right shoppers at the right time.
For years, Constructor’s AI-based platform has helped retailers show shoppers the best organic results in search, browse, recommendations and more — powering hundreds of millions of personalized experiences each day. Sponsored Listings marks Constructor’s expansion into retail media, bringing its expertise in personalization and product-ranking to this fast-growing space.
A smarter approach to sponsored placements
Too often today, the sponsored products shown to shoppers are generic and impersonal — shortchanging all parties involved. For example, if a male shopper searches for “black dress shoes” on his favorite department store site, and sponsored listings show women’s heels when the shopper expects men’s Oxfords — then everyone loses: the shopper, the retailer, and the advertiser paying for the listing. Instead, Constructor bakes personalization into what’s displayed. The result is a win-win-win: Shoppers get a more helpful, tailored experience; advertisers target an audience with a higher purchasing intent; and retailers increase revenue from shoppers and advertising partners alike.
“Retail media including sponsored listings is a really exciting arena for helping retailers grow their businesses and letting brands surface less well-known products to more shoppers,” said Constructor CEO Eli Finkelshteyn. “Unfortunately, for many sites, this happens at the expense of user experience for shoppers, who are inundated with what feel like irrelevant and annoying ads. Shoppers have a choice for where they shop, and turning them off with a bad experience is not really a long-term option. And a big part of the reason all of this happens is that while organic results are powered by a search engine built for returning relevant and personalized results users want, sponsored results are powered by something else — and the two systems don’t really talk.”
Finkelshteyn continued: “We wanted to create a solution to this problem by taking the best-in-class relevance and personalization algorithms we’ve spent years developing for search, browse, recommendations, and other forms of discovery — and allowing them to be applied to sponsored results as well. Retail media isn’t just a billboard you can sell to the highest bidder. It’s a core part of the user experience for a retailer. The best retail media results are those a shopper is happy to see and wants to interact with — and those are also the only ones that drive return on ad spend (ROAS). We want every result, whether it comes from organic search or from retail media, to feel like a great result to the shopper. That’s what the future of retail media looks like — and it’s a future that drives revenue for the retailer, revenue for the advertiser, and a great shopping experience for the shopper.”
Constructor’s Sponsored Listings product:
- Provides a more natural, cohesive shopping experience by integrating sponsored results with organic ones.
- Balances ad revenue with organic revenue. Constructor is unique in optimizing organic and sponsored listings together. Ads get shown only when they increase a retailer’s target business metric.
- Shows helpful ads only. Ads shown are optimized not just for “relevance” (e.g.,: Is this a shoe?) but “attractiveness” (Is this a shoe the shopper will want to buy?).
- Gives retailers full control over ad supply. No limits, no extra fees — retailers can add or swap as many ad slots as needed.
- Feeds data to, and gets it from, Constructor’s holistic platform. Every search, click, add-to-cart, and conversion makes Constructor’s platform smarter — driving even better personalization across the organic and sponsored results it powers.
Sponsored Listings in action
As it expanded into retail media, home24, a leading European home and living ecommerce company, turned to Constructor. Having already used Constructor’s platform to personalize shoppers’ search and browse experiences onsite — driving double-digit growth in search conversion rate — extending to Sponsored Listings was a natural next step. The results have been impressive, with home24 projecting a seven-figure increase in ad revenue within a year, all without sacrificing organic revenue.
“Working with Constructor on our new retail media platform has been a game-changer,” said Gianluca Randisi, chief product and technology officer, home24. “Their dynamic bidding system, which adjusts ad placement costs in real time based on demand and product performance, is truly innovative. This ensures advertisers get maximum ROI without harming organic rankings. For example, the cost of a top spot for a garden chair adjusts automatically based on the day’s temperature and demand. Plus, it simplifies the process for our publishers to identify high-potential ad placements. This partnership has significantly enhanced our platform’s efficiency and value.”
How it works
Constructor factors in attractiveness, personalization, bid amounts, and retailers’ key business metrics when determining whether to place an organic or sponsored result in a given slot. If the projected advertising revenue doesn’t offset the retailer’s organic revenue loss, then a sponsored placement won’t be shown. Unlike with other retail media networks (RMNs), the goal is to maximize overall revenue for retailers.
Constructor can both integrate with a retailer’s existing RMN or operate as an RMN itself — enabling retailers to sell sponsored slots to brands, and displaying the ads across search, browse and product recommendations.
Retailers who use Constructor’s Sponsored Listings benefit from:
- Smarter ad pricing: Constructor gives insights into fair bid amounts, so retailers can guide advertisers on competitive pricing for ad placements.
- Simple campaign management: Retailers can create, adjust and monitor ad campaigns in one place — setting rules for bids, budgets and timing to best balance ad revenue and user experience.
- Clear performance insights: Retailers get real-time analytics on ad spend, clicks, revenue and ROAS, so they can hone campaigns and maximize revenue.
- New revenue opportunities: Constructor uncovers search queries and product/category pages where adding Sponsored Listings could drive more ad revenue.
Advertisers, in turn, benefit from:
- Transparent performance tracking: It’s easy to see how campaigns are performing — impacting metrics from revenue and ROAS, to clicks and spend — to make data-driven decisions.
- Easy campaign control: They can adjust bids, budgets and timing to maximize results.
- Smarter ad placements: Constructor identifies high-potential spots for ads — ensuring they’re shown to the right shoppers, and appear in search results and on pages where that shopper is most likely to convert.
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