Imagine you’re a weightlifter exploring a website, you come across many different resources for helping you improve your form and giving you tips on taking your workouts to the next level. The only problem is - the webpage is riddled with ads, the worst kind of ads - banner ads. What is more, these ads are not even relevant to the content you’re looking at.
The more you scroll, the more ads pop up in a way that is intrusive to your reading experience. And let’s say you are actually interested in one of them - like the one about the smart watch helping you train better.
What happens when you click on this ad? Well, you’re redirected to the general Samsung website with all their products and you have to manually search for the watch or any other product you’d like to buy.
Why is this a problem for you and for the weightlifting website?
The likelihood of someone actually clicking on a banner ad is so low that it’s negligible. This is because most of us have learned to visually filter out this type of ads or have installed an adblocking plugin to completely hide them.
If a user does actually make a purchase, there’s no attribution so the host website doesn't get any revenue from that transaction. This happens because upon clicking on the ad, the user is taken to the general brand’s website and once they start navigating it, there’s no way to link to the original source.
Generally speaking, Hosting ads is no longer an effective way to monetize. CPM rates are approaching $0 because attribution does not reward the sites that host ads and affiliate links.
Overall, this lack of attribution between ad and purchase is hurting hosts, brands, and consumers.
That’s why we created the MealMe API.
Our mission is to enable websites to replace online ads with Shoppable Ads to attribute purchases and increase revenue.
What are Shoppable Ads you may ask?
It’s something we’ve been developing for the last 2.5 years because we noticed that even if we spent $200k+ per month on TikTok, Facebook, and Google - we couldn’t efficiently track if any of the users who saw our ads actually converted to a purchase.
We realized that online ad attribution is broken. Updates to the global privacy settings on the web and in iOS decreased the general advertiser’s ability to understand the connection between who saw an ad, who clicked on it and who, in fact, executed a relevant transaction.
Now back to Shoppable Ads - MealMe is revolutionizing the online advertising industry by allowing users to make a purchase on the host website by integrating our SDK and API.
What does that mean?
For the consumer, it means that they can make a purchase without leaving the website they’re on. It means that they can still enjoy the content that’s important to them AND buy something that’s contextually relevant.
For the host websites, they can easily track who actually made a purchase on the site.
For the brands that are advertising, they can see which host websites are bringing in traffic that converts to a purchase.
Here is our proposal for how this would work. We’re talking to Twitch about integrating into their streaming platform. Essentially, instead of a floating banner ad that has no track-ability, we would embed a purchasing interface directly on the screen so that Twitch users can buy a product that they saw in the ad without leaving the content they’re watching.
