Being the biggest e-commerce platform in Africa, Jumia has over 3 million customers who regularly visit the site to shop.
With this amount of traffic, Jumia looks to monetise by pushing advertisements on the site. According to the company’s CEO Sam Chappatte, Jumia will be using the customer data it has to direct advertisements to those who are likely to be interested.
Although some of the data collected by Jumia might be considered personal, the platform does not share the data with the advertisers but rather uses it to channel the adverts to the relevant targeted audience.
With the data it collects, Jumia observes the customer’s behaviour on their site and try and predict where the customer’s interests lie. The e-commerce platform also possesses the demographic data of all its customers.
“We know what they put in the cart, where they live, what they have looked at online,” Chappatte explained the kind of data Jumia takes from its customers.
“We do not give this data to our (advertising) clients because there is strict confidentiality between us and the customer. We only allow the clients to give us their targets then we make sure the adverts get to the targets,” he added.
Chappatte further emphasized that their messages will reach highly targeted segments, right at the moment of purchase. For instance, DSTV ads will be presented to people who are buying new TVs, or when selling beer, key messages can be shown to customers who are looking at a competitor’s product.
“We are launching advertising in response to significant demand from agencies and brands. For effective digital marketing campaigns, you need data. This is what is special about our solution – and why leading brands that have been piloting with us over the last months are coming back for more,” the Jumia boss concluded.
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Competition With Digital Media
With its entrance to advertising, Jumia will be competing with the struggling digital media sector which gets much of its revenue from advertising. Digital media is still growing in Kenya with some companies having hacked into it completely while others are still lagging.
Some digital media houses are still struggling to attract advertisers. Recently, Hivisasa was forced to close owing to the fact that it was not getting as much revenue from advertising as other players in the market.
Jumia joining the pool with monetisation of its site will only mean that the playing field will be rougher. The e-commerce platform will definitely attract advertisers easily because of the traffic it gets and the data it possesses.
