Creating a better search experience with dynamic and personalized sponsored ads

Millions of customers love the convenience of online grocery shopping. Kroger is committed to seamless online shopping – along with their promise of the freshest products and incredible value. 84.51°’s role in that promise is to deploy technology which helps customers fill their baskets faster.

Every ecommerce experience is constricted by digital device screens. Only so many products can appear on a screen at the same time – and scrolling through a long digital aisle is a waste of shoppers’ time. We sought to change that.

The Kroger Onsite Ad Technology team engaged 84.51° Data Science and Research Labs teams to create a proprietary two-phased approach. In the offline first phase, a model that decouples the positional and item relevancy effects is learned using a combination of historical clickstream and search result data. The online phase searches the set of positions of the sponsored ads returned from the auction. It uses the modeled relevancy and position effects and the clustering from the offline phase to search for the optimal position of the sponsored ads.

The deployed solution, Dynamic Positioner (DP), improved the search experience on the Kroger app and website by presenting customers ads that they were more likely to find relevant and useful. The results broadly indicated that the search experience was not only improved, but customers were more willing to explore the sponsored ads.

Download