How Rakuten France surged ad responses by 83% with Mirakl Ads

Rakuten France is a major French e-commerce platform and leader in the circular economy that offers a wide variety of new, used and refurbished goods from both professional sellers and individuals. With more than 15 million monthly visitors, they're driven by an optimistic vision of eCommerce and offer one of the most generous loyalty programs in the country — Club R.

Through their online services, Rakuten France also supports more than 12,000 professional sellers and partners in their digitalization.

Why Rakuten needed a retail media solution

Retail media is quickly becoming one of the largest segments in global ad spend. In 2025 alone, advertisers are projected to spend $179.5 billion to better target audiences, personalize ads and convert new and existing customers.

As an early adopter of retail media in 2013, Rakuten France is no stranger to the competitive nature of the space. But as the landscape evolved, their existing solution started to hit its limits. To stay ahead and keep delivering value at scale, Rakuten realized it was time to rethink their retail media strategy. They needed a partner who could help them significantly enhance the effectiveness of their offerings for more than 10,000 marketplace sellers.

Accomplishing this would require a solution that could help them achieve their goals of:

• Scalability: A self-service solution for all sellers — from small businesses to global sellers — featuring automated campaigns that scan sellers' entire product catalogues to promote the best products to each shopper.
• Control: A self-service platform that empowers retailers to independently develop and oversee their advertising placements, providing the functionality to establish category-specific floor prices and monitor performance metrics in real time.
• Improved performance: Through AI-powered product matching and recommendation, Mirakl has proven better monetization performance for Rakuten and improved campaign results for sellers.

"Retail media has been part of Rakuten's DNA since the beginning. Shifting to Mirakl Ads equips us with the tools necessary to keep on effectively engaging our sellers, advertisers and clients to drive business growth." — Matthieu Denime, Rakuten France Sales Director

Why Rakuten chose Mirakl Ads

As an early pioneer of the space, Rakuten France has been running successful retail media strategies since 2013. As such, the French retailer has a keen sense of what "good" looks like.

When seeking out a retail media solution, Rakuten France prioritized tools that could help them maximize revenue, seller participation and customer relevance by overhauling their ad serving technology.

To identify the optimal solution, Rakuten conducted a thorough head-to-head test of Mirakl Ads' algorithm, evenly dividing website traffic between Mirakl Ads and their existing provider.

As a comprehensive retail media solution, Mirakl Ads offers Rakuten a number of key advantages, including:

• White-label customization: The Mirakl Ads platform is fully branded for Rakuten (colors, logo, URL and SSO login) ensuring a seamless seller experience.
• AI and automation: Mirakl Ads' AI solution leverages advanced search technology and smart algorithms to deliver highly relevant, personalized ads. It combines semantic and vector search with multimodal embedding, and continuously tests and optimizes performance using a multi-armed bandit approach — always ensuring the best-fitting product is shown to each shopper, on every placement.
• Flexible campaign tools: With Mirakl Ads, sellers can decide to automate or keep control over their campaign creation. All sellers can create campaigns, with forecasting and optimisation guidance, empowering them regardless of their digital maturity.
• Personalisation at scale: Each ad opportunity is tailored to maximise relevance for Rakuten's 200M+ product catalogue and millions of site visitors.

Rakuten integrated Mirakl's algorithm to run a three-month A/B test with 50% of their users.

Users were randomly divided into two groups and saw different ads based on which algorithm was serving them. The test directly compared Mirakl's product recommendation algorithm against Rakuten's existing system.

The results were clear — Mirakl's algorithm delivered better performance, and that, combined with Mirakl Ads unique features, sealed the deal with Rakuten.

How Mirakl Ads' AI-powered matching improved Rakuten's retail media performance

Within just three months of implementing Mirakl Ads, Rakuten France experienced the following remarkable outcomes:

• Increased ad responses: Ad response rates surged by 83%, improvement in the engine's ability to match the right keywords with the right products — and to connect products with one another more effectively.
• Higher ad inventory fill rates: Ad inventory fill rates rose by 60%, demonstrating enhanced ability to occupy available ad slots.
• Improved click-through rates: Click-through rates increased by 25%, reflecting the greater relevance of sponsored products displayed by Mirakl Ads. This improvement suggests that not only was ad inventory better utilized, but the presented products were more appealing to users.
• Stronger monetization performance: A higher fill rate led to more ad impressions. And, because those impressions were also more relevant — as shown by a higher click-through rate — overall monetization improved significantly, with a 53% increase in clicks-per-loaded-page.

"One of the reasons we chose the Mirakl Ads platform is its agility. It offers us a unique opportunity to address both brands and merchants, each with very different needs. Mirakl Ads provides a sophisticated and customizable campaign creation process for major brands, while also offering an automated, user-friendly module for smaller merchants. This flexibility is essential for scaling Retail Media on marketplaces like Rakuten, which work with a wide range of partners." — Kristina Raptovaia, Head of Partnerships and Advertising, Rakuten France