AppCard has launched its Digital Circular with built-in onsite and offsite advertising, giving independent grocers targeting tools designed to help them compete against larger chains.
Grocers upload a static weekly ad to the Circular Management dashboard in the AppCard Management Suite, where Pinky, AppCard’s AI, converts it into a clickable circular in minutes. When a shopper taps a sale item, Pinky serves a kitchen-tested recipe built around it, drawn from a library of more than 6,500. The shopper can then add needed ingredients to a shopping list, turning one sale item into a fuller basket.
The same circular can be built into an offsite ad, with AppCard helping grocers pinpoint which households see it using spend patterns, ZIP code and point-of-sale data reflecting what shoppers actually buy. Ads run on Google, YouTube, Gmail and news, sports and lifestyle sites, with budget allocation and results tracked in the AMS dashboard rather than a separate ad platform.
“Guesswork is expensive. When a grocer’s circular is built on what shoppers actually buy, every piece of it works harder: the recipes, the shopping list and the ads they see online,” said Amichay Oren, co-founder and CTO at AppCard.
Early results
Crops Fresh Marketplace, a single-store independent in Pennsylvania, reported that daily page views rose 5.8 times, from about 204 to 1,180, after offsite ads went live, comparing the weeks before and after launch. Daily sessions rose 2.6 times, from about 127 to 330, and pages per session roughly doubled. The company said the ads have earned click-through rates of 2 percent to 3 percent, above common display benchmarks.
“I was watching YouTube at home when my own circular came on. That is when it hit me,” said Chad Cropper, owner and director of operations at Crops Fresh Marketplace. “We are reaching people who already shop with us, and people like them, because the targeting uses what my customers actually buy.”
The Digital Circular is available now to AppCard retailers.
New York-based AppCard is a data-driven rewards and shopper analytics platform serving more than 3,300 grocers. The company uses AI and machine learning to deliver personalized marketing, digital coupons and real-time analytics through one solution.