Ocado’s Data Strategy: Turning Shopper Insights into Action
Ocado, the UK’s largest dedicated online supermarket, has launched a multi-pronged strategy to leverage its wealth of shopper data, transforming insights about customer behavior into actionable intelligence for brands. In a recent interview, Jack Johnson, Head of Retail Media and Data at Ocado, outlined how the company’s data-centric approach is shaping brand strategy going into 2025. At the heart of this effort is a robust analytics infrastructure and an emphasis on first-party data, both for internal optimization and for empowering its supplier and advertiser ecosystem.
In operational terms, Ocado collects comprehensive real-time data from every touchpoint on its digital platform: search keywords, basket composition, engagement times, promotion performance, and delivery-date behaviors. This data fuels its Retail Data Platform, which is designed to offer deep insights not just for Ocado’s own merchandising and promotional decisions, but—critically—for the suppliers and brands whose products fill Ocado’s virtual shelves. These capabilities are further enhanced through Ocado’s ‘State of Search’ thought leadership, which explores shopper intent, keyword patterns (including misspellings), and purchase timing in granular detail (Ocado Ads State of Search Report 2025).
E-commerce Relevance: Infrastructure and Feed Optimization
Ocado's embrace of shopper data is particularly significant for e-commerce infrastructure and the mechanics of content automation:
Product Feeds and Catalog Standards: The move towards data-driven merchandising is enabling brands to optimize product feeds and content structures. Performance intelligence delivered via embedded analytics ensures that suppliers have a unified view of retail metrics—such as SKU-level conversion rates and search visibility—empowering them to refine catalog entries and optimize availability. Learn more about effective product feed structure and integration with our comprehensive guide on Product feeds
Quality and Completeness of Product Cards: By sharing detailed interaction and performance data, Ocado incentivizes brands to improve asset richness—images, descriptions, and attributes—based on what converts and what customers search for. The feedback loop between real-time analytics and product content helps rise the overall quality and completeness of digital product cards, addressing gaps revealed in shopper engagement data (Bad Product Descriptions).
Speed-to-Market for New Assortment: Self-service data tools and continuous flow of insights accelerate the process of onboarding and promoting new product lines. Brands using the Ocado Retail Data Platform reportedly experience faster growth in assortment performance. Real-time access to basket-building and promotion data allows for quicker adjustment and alignment with buyer trends, shortening time-to-market for high-demand items. By using Delta Feeds, efficiency and speed can be further boosted.
The Evolution of Retail Media: Privacy, Partnerships, and AI
Ocado’s data strategy stands out in the context of seismic changes in the retail media landscape. The rise of retail media—where advertising is served close to the point of purchase, leveraging intent and context signals—hinges on the richness of transaction-level data and the retirement of third-party cookies. Ocado’s positioning is differentiated by its status as a pure online retailer capturing all customer interactions natively.
Recent collaborations with major publishers such as News UK and Future showcase Ocado’s push towards “full-funnel” data targeting. Enabled by clean room technologies like those provided by Permutive, Ocado is allowing its anonymized purchase insights to be matched with publisher audience behavior data. This approach allows for granular ad targeting without direct data sharing, complying with evolving privacy regulations. For advertisers, this delivers a powerful blend of upper-funnel context and lower-funnel purchase intent, breaking new ground for cross-channel attribution and reach (Digiday).
The challenge—according to Johnson—is managing the volume and velocity of data. Decisive action depends not just on having data, but on delivering insights to business users instantly, minimizing lag between customer actions and marketing response. This is an infrastructure challenge, requiring scalable, secure data platforms and rapid supply chain integration so content updates and assortment changes reflect real-time demand.
Impact on Automation: No-code, AI, and Scalability
Automation is central to Ocado’s vision. The company’s platforms offer no-code analytics capabilities, enabling merchandisers and brands to interrogate data and deploy new campaigns without technical barriers. The proliferation of self-service dashboards and embedded analytics fosters organizational agility, allowing content teams to respond dynamically to shopper trends.
Artificial intelligence plays a key role in parsing unstructured data—such as free-text search queries and intent signals—and in surfacing predictive insights for merchandising and advertising. Ocado’s approach mirrors wider industry adoption of generative AI for search, categorization, and recommendation tasks. The utilization of AI to catalog common misspellings and emerging product terms signifies a shift towards automated content enrichment, where product cards and feed entries are continuously tailored to observed customer language and behavior.
Looking ahead, the convergence of first-party retail data, publisher audience signals, and AI-powered automation is rewriting standards for e-commerce cataloging, feed management, and campaign optimization. Brands connected to Ocado’s data infrastructure are increasingly expected to match the speed and granularity of digital marketplaces—rich, complete product content delivered in real-time, mapped precisely to shopper demand.
Feeding the Omnichannel Loop: Real-Time Insights Drive Strategy
The intersection of retail media, data partnerships, and platform automation is transforming how assortment, promotions, and content are planned and delivered. The close coupling of rich shopper data with merchandising not only boosts feed fidelity and product card quality but also enables more responsive inventory management and pricing optimization. As retail media networks scale, the line between content infrastructure (product catalog, feed management) and campaign delivery (ad placements, offers) continues to blur.
Timeliness, highlighted by Johnson, is a decisive competitive advantage. Retail cycles operate in hours, not weeks, and only those e-commerce players with real-time insight delivery can hope to meet evolving customer expectations.
Marketplace Dynamics and Industry Significance
Ocado’s strategy is indicative of a broader industry trend: as retail media evolves, the power of first-party shopper data becomes central to content automation, campaign targeting, and ultimately, customer loyalty. With clean room partnerships addressing privacy and cross-channel integration, e-commerce platforms are positioning themselves as both data custodians and innovation hubs.
Ocado’s approach exemplifies how ownership of end-to-end shopper data can be monetized as a profit center, not just for internal operations but as an external value proposition for suppliers and brands. As more retailers adopt similar models, standardized cataloging, feed optimization, and AI-supported automation will become the norm, raising the bar for content quality and speed in every digital marketplace.
For further industry perspectives on retail media data clean rooms and publisher partnerships, see Digiday. More technical insight into Ocado’s analytics platform and supplier impact is available via Tableau.
NotPIM Expert Commentary: This Ocado initiative highlights the growing importance of real-time data in e-commerce. NotPIM's core functionalities—automated feed management, data enrichment, and integrations with various systems—directly address the challenges of dealing with high volumes of complex data. Brands seeking to leverage similar strategies will benefit from the speed and accuracy of automated data handling, ensuring up-to-the-minute content management to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving marketplace.