The AdTech Advantage: Boosting Mercado Pago's Customer Base
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Mercado Libre is the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America. Through a suite of technology solutions including Mercado Pago, Mercado Ads, Mercado Envios, and Mercado Creditos they enable customers in 18 countries to carry out their commerce offering solutions across the entire value chain.
The Challenge
Mercado Pago operates in one of the most competitive financial ecosystems in Latin America, constantly evolving to meet the needs of both buyers and sellers. To strengthen its position as the go-to platform for payments, collections, and financial services, the company needed to uncover new ways to drive engagement and product adoption within its merchant base. That’s where Muttdata came in.
The project’s main objective was to increase Mercado Pago’s Total Payment Volume (TPV) by boosting its share of wallet — encouraging existing sellers to diversify and use a broader range of financial products available on the platform. Through close collaboration with their business, marketing, and technology teams, we identified key opportunities to enhance their AdTech and Marketing strategy, including audience segmentation, channel optimization (push, email, and in-platform messages), and personalized recommendations.
The challenge was twofold: first, to determine which products to recommend to each seller, and second, to identify how and when to deliver those recommendations for maximum impact — a task requiring both technical precision and business insight.
The Solution
Muttdata designed and implemented a multi-channel recommendation framework powered by machine learning to help Mercado Pago personalize and optimize its marketing communications across display ads, email, WhatsApp, and push notifications. The system predicts each seller’s likelihood to engage with specific products or services in a given week, generating tailored recommendations that balance business goals with user experience.
Each recommendation is dynamically fine-tuned according to:
- Delivery timing, optimizing frequency caps and engagement windows.
- Channel selection, choosing the best medium (push, email, or in-platform message) based on interaction history.
- Product prioritization, spotlighting the most relevant service for each seller.
- Message optimization, testing variations in copy through a Multi-Armed Bandit approach to maximize conversion.
Eligibility filters ensure that only qualified sellers receive communications, while exclusion rules establish clean control groups for A/B testing.
A fully automated, data-driven recommendation engine that continuously learns from past performance to refine outreach, helping Mercado Pago deliver the right message, through the right channel, at the right time. A 4% nominal increase, from 6% to 10% of the seller base.
