Dive Brief:

• Fragrance and beauty company Coty is testing a new tool with its media agency Zenith to analyze retailers' e-commerce offerings and determine where to send traffic from its digital ad campaigns, according to a Zenith news release.
• The Retail Assessment tool analyzes U.K. and international retailers and rates the performance of their e-commerce platforms in terms of their effectiveness as sales and marketing drivers. Retailers are scored on more than 20 different items, including webpage speed, mobile readiness, checkout ease, share of category search and media solutions. Zenith added additional staff to help develop commerce solutions and created a dedicated hub to serve global and U.K. clients due to client demand.
• The tool aims to help Coty learn where to drive its paid media traffic for each of its brands and how to invest "digital trade budgets" to enhance growth. Coty's fragrance category has seen online sales rise 17% compared to flat sales offline, The Drum reported.

Dive Insight:

Zenith's new Retail Assessment tool could help brands combine sales and marketing insights to drive growth. By comparing performances of e-commerce platforms, marketers will be able to better determine the effectiveness and ROI of their digital ad spend. It's also an effort to hold e-commerce sites to the same standards as digital media, as retailers are increasingly serving as digital publishers and grabbing larger shares of ad dollars.

Amazon's U.S. ad business, for example, is estimated to grow more than 50% this year, with its share of the digital ad market reaching 8.8%, eMarketer predicts. Meanwhile, the combined digital ad share for the Google-Facebook duopoly will decline in 2019 for the first time.

With marketers spending more on digital, only 26% have expressed confidence in their ability to measure ROI on digital, and more are investing in consumer-centric, omnichannel strategies, according to Nielsen's latest CMO report. Rather than more data-gathering, marketers seek new solutions and technology to leverage the data's insights. Zenith's Retail Assessment could help marketers work through some of these problems.

Coty continues to invest in technology to connect with consumers and better personalize experiences. The company recently debuted a multi-sensory virtual reality (VR) experience that immerses consumers into its fragrances and helps them find a new scent. Shoppers could wear a VR headset and pick up a scented stone to activate an eight-second video bringing the "olfactive territory" to life with 3D visuals and sound.