Isn't it wonderful that we have five senses? Armed intruders may be seen, trains can be heard coming, running gas can be smelled, spoilt milk can be tasted, and burning coal underfoot. Which sense is designed to safeguard us from breaking our necks when walking up milk box stacks? In any event, life becomes more difficult as you lose your senses. You start slamming your head against walls, wandering into traffic, cuddling skunks, dancing nude in cactus patches, and still walking up milk crate stacks. Many companies are left defenseless without digital shelf analytics, it turns out.
The continual process of evaluating e-commerce data from the digital shelf is known as digital shelf analytics. While the digital shelf is vast in scope — it encompasses the full online buying experience - digital shelf analytics focuses on product page performance indicators.
These metrics are critical to the success of every e-commerce business, but many don't have the tools or infrastructure in place to monitor, measure, and respond to them. While you may manually gather certain digital shelf analytics in the realm of e-commerce, the volume of data and the rate at which it changes makes manual attempts ineffective.
To dominate the digital shelf, e-commerce firms must be flexible. You need to know what your buyers see when they go online to research your product category, and you need to keep fine-tuning your digital assets to keep your shelf presence strong. Digital shelf analytics isn't just a passive process of tracking and measuring crucial data; you're tracking and measuring these metrics to take action, or you'll find yourself utterly oblivious to what's going on the digital shelf.
We'll look at the following topics in this blog:
- Why are digital shelf analytics so important?
- What should digital shelf analytics track?
- How to utilize and deploy digital shelf analytics
Importance of Digital Shelf Analytics
E-Commerce already strains your brand too thinly, causing you to make difficult choices about where to put your time, resources, and talent. So, what's the point of investing in digital shelf analytics? Because if you don't have it, your items can end up at the bottom of the shelf.
Top e-commerce firms are investing in digital shelf analytics for a variety of reasons.
Analyze Your Online Performance
Digital shelf analytics, at its most basic level, aids in determining where you are in comparison to your competitors and how well your digital assets represent your brand. Every e-commerce site has its ecosystem, in which brands and sellers strive to appear as the top option in their area, based on how the site categorizes items, how users browse those categories, and what the store's search engine prefers.
Digital shelf metrics provide information on the performance of your brand. If you don't keep track of them, it's like driving without a speedometer or a fuel gauge: you're losing crucial information and might crash at any moment. You can't just look at sales to figure out what's going on in the digital world. You need to know who's winning the search engines, how your product pages differ from site to site, where your distribution network has to be fixed, and how much traffic you're sending to each seller.
Look for Chances that Your Competitors Aren't Aware Of
Digital shelf analytics entails more than just counting data points. Smart e-commerce businesses make use of this information to acquire a competitive advantage. Assume you have the ability to monitor when competitors' products are out of stock. You have an opportune opportunity to capitalize on their branded search by doubling down on advertisements after their product is no longer accessible through a merchant. When people search for a competitor by name and discover that it is out of stock, your brand may appear as the next best option.
Let's say a certain brand has just received a lot of negative feedback. That might be a sign of a broader issue that needs to be investigated. If their recent negative reviews all point to the same problems with the product or the experience, it's important emphasizing how your brand or product avoids this from happening. This is where digital shelf analytics may help you gain a competitive advantage.
Boost the Exposure of Your Company
One of the most significant advantages of digital shelf analytics is that it aids in the discovery of your items and increases your online presence. You now have the information you need to figure out what's trending in search engines and how to tailor your product pages to these trends. You may determine which websites are failing and uncover modifications that may be obstructing your visibility.
Increase your Conversion Rates
One of the most important metrics to track is conversion rates. They show how well a certain asset converts customers into customers. In e-commerce, you must not only keep track of how modifications to a product page affect conversion rate, but you must also keep track of how conversion rates differ from one seller to the next.
When selling items through a store or marketplace, conversion rates are influenced by more than just your writing, graphics, and other materials. The customer's experience is also influenced by the vendor. If your product pages are the same everywhere you sell but your conversion rates aren't, it doesn't mean your brand isn't persuasive. However, it is a chance to boost your total conversion rates by sending more visitors to your most productive partners.
Because merchants and marketplaces do not provide this information, the only way to obtain it is through digital shelf analytics systems that track the traffic you give to stores and the transactions that ensue.
Boost the Credibility of Your Brand
Assume you're applying for the same position at five different companies. You introduce yourself and discuss your skills and limitations in slightly different ways in each application. They may all be technically correct depictions of yourself, but they all convey a distinctive impression, and one of them is likely to be more successful than the others.
That is why it is critical to preserve and improve your brand's integrity. You want to make sure that consumers get the same image of your brand no matter where they see it, and that they always see the best depiction of your items.
Inconsistencies across product pages might hurt conversion rates and mislead your goods (especially if there are outdated assets). If someone is looking for your product precisely, these differences may lead them to believe that some product sites aren't genuine.
Digital shelf analytics allows you to keep track of each seller's content compliance, allowing you to discover flaws in your brand's integrity before they become larger issues.
Influence the Market for Your Product Category
When you're the first brand people see when they look into your product category, you have a lot of power over the features and traits they value the most, influencing how they see your competitor’s and how they think about their objectives. If you stay on top for a long time, other brands will undoubtedly want to copy you. Keep studying and adjusting your digital shelf position, and other businesses in your area will be left playing catch-up for the rest of their lives.
What are the Metrics That Digital Shelf Analytics Track?
In terms of technology, digital shelf analytics can track and analyze almost any parameter related to the online consumer experience. However, you should concentrate on facts that may be used to analyze and enhance your position. The most important indicators for e-commerce businesses are:
- Adherence to the content (titles, descriptions, and imagery)
- The Ratio of search results
- Reviews and Ratings
- Per marketplace, the number of vendors
- Conversion rate Stock status
- Traffic
- Rate of cart abandonment in traffic
Depending on the measure you're looking at, seeing these data points in real-time or over a set period of time may be more useful. A top-tier digital shelf analytics system should allow you to investigate each indicator in the most efficient manner possible.
Data in Real-Time
To take use of the benefits presented by some digital shelf measurements, rapid reactions are required. Assume that a hugely popular competitor's product is sold out on Target.com. Your window might be hours or days, but if enough people search for this competition at Target, you could steal sales every minute! You're missing out if your tools only pull data a few times each day.
Variation throughout the Time
Isolating date ranges and looking at metrics across time can help you detect trends that you wouldn't see if you just looked at aggregate real-time data. If your product has thousands of reviews, for example, a few one-star reviews won't have much of an impact on your overall rating, but if your average rating over the last few weeks or months looks significantly lower than your overall average, it could be a sign that there's a problem you need to investigate.
Other indicators, such as search share, are similar. You don't only want to know where you are today; you also want to know if you and your competitors are gaining or losing position.
What is the Best Way to "do" Digital Shelf Analytics?
The majority of companies are unprepared for digital shelf analytics. They don't have the resources, time, or skill to acquire the data they need and turn it into useful information. Some of the data you'll need to evaluate will require specialist tools. Even data that you can manually acquire — such as ratings, stock status, content compliance, or your position in search results — is tough to arrange and maintain up to date.
To benefit from digital shelf analytics, e-commerce businesses must:
- Data collecting should be automated.
- Employees should be committed to the process.
- Digital touch points should be optimized.
- Create a digital shelf plan.
Data Collecting Should be automated
The amount of data that marketers can acquire is both valuable and terrifying. It's tough to keep up with real-time data collecting when you have thousands of SKUs and hundreds of merchants. Even if you commit an entire department to the process, there will be flaws. Scraping Intelligence’s Brand Monitoring service, can gather real-time data for your complete catalogue from thousands of online shops and more than 20 online marketplaces.
You can analyze everything Brand Monitor collects in an accessible dashboard, making it simple to transform data into insights.
It's a pleasure to assess content compliance. Brand Monitor evaluates how well each product page adheres to your requirements, detects any differences it discovers on the web, and assigns a compliance score to each page.
The Share of Search dashboard from Brand Monitor gives you a bird's-eye view of how well your products are performing in key product-related searches for each retailer, highlighting the percentage of organic and paid search results that your products appear in.
The Share of Search dashboard from Brand Monitor gives you a bird's-eye view of how well your products are performing in key product-related searches for each retailer, highlighting the percentage of organic and paid search results that your products appear in.
Employees should be committed to the Process
You don't wait for an annual physical or a severe health problem to develop before you treat your own health seriously if you respect it. Every day, you pay attention to your body's messages concerning the foods you eat and the activities you engage in. Similarly, you shouldn't rely on quarterly or even monthly statistics to monitor the health of your brand. Digital shelf analytics, like diet and exercise, is a continual activity that should have an influence on day-to-day operations.
Employees devoted to reporting on digital shelf analytics, translating those indicators into useful insights, and searching for ways to improve are required for this to happen.
Make Your Digital Touch points more effective
The goal of digital shelf analytics is to have a better understanding of your brand's shelf position so that you can enhance it.
If your rankings drop, you should look at why your competitors are gaining ground. In what ways do their titles and descriptions correspond better with your target keywords? If your ratings are declining, look for trends in bad reviews so you can address any problems with your product, delivery, or service. When a competitor's product is out of stock, increase your ad budget and target their branded keywords.
Create a Digital Shelf Plan
Digital shelf analytics should be integrated into a larger digital shelf strategy since it is a continuous process of reacting to data and enhancing your online presence. You'll need to make a strategy for what happens with your data, who uses it, and how it fits into the rest of your brand's goals and efforts.
Invest in a Digital Shelf Analytics Program
Brand Monitor is the industry-leading program for digital shelf analytics. Scraping Intelligence supplies your brand with data and insights that can't be found anywhere else, based on two decades of specialist ecommerce data collecting technologies. Many of the world's most well-known brands rely on our services, and you'll need a top-tier digital shelf solution to get to the top and remain there.
Looking for e-commerce product data scraping services? Contact Scraping Intelligence today!
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