The DataWeave Blog

Category: KPI

A Guide to Digital Shelf Metrics for Consumer Brands
Our world is increasingly going online. We work online, socialize online, and shop online every day. As a consumer brand, you need to ensure complete awareness of your brand’s online presence across eCommerce platforms, search engines, and media.

Only by deeply understanding the customer journey can you ensure that your product is reaching your ideal customers and maximizing your brand’s market share. You need data to intrinsically understand your customer journey and make changes where you’re lacking.

As the old adage goes: ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure.’

You need digital shelf metrics to measure and start benchmarking your buyer’s journey. To find several of these types of key performance indicators (KPIs), you need a digital shelf analytics solution. These platforms allow you to track various metrics along the path to purchase from the awareness stage to the post-purchase phase across the entire internet, helping to inform online and offline sales strategies.

Digital shelf analytics will help you gain insights into how your brand is doing versus the competition, which areas are lagging behind in historical performance, and what activities are driving sales. There are innumerable ways in which you can leverage these valuable insights. But how do you know which KPIs to start tracking with your digital shelf analytics solution?

Here, we’ve summarized the top metric types your peers report, track and base their decisions on.

With these KPIs in hand, consumer brands like yours can ensure that their products are consistently visible and appealing to their target audience across online marketplaces, ultimately enhancing conversion rates, market share, and profitability.

Read this guide to learn more about the top digital shelf metrics consumer brands are tracking and how to use them in your own strategy.

1. Share of Search

Share of Search (SoS) is a KPI in digital shelf analytics that measures how frequently a consumer brand’s products appear in search results on eCommerce platforms relative to the competition for specific keywords. A good digital shelf analytics solution will be able to show this metric across all the top marketplaces and retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, but also more niche marketplaces for industry-specific selling.

This metric provides brands with a quantifiable way to measure how frequently their products are being “served up” to customers on online marketplaces. Essentially, it measures visibility and discoverability.

With Share of Search on DataWeave, you can slice and dice your data in innumerable ways. These are a few important views you can see:
- Aggregated SoS
- Organic and Sponsored SoS scores
- SoS scores across brands, retailers, keywords, cities
- Historical SoS score trends
Once you have benchmarked your SoS and category presence relative to your competition, you need to start interpreting the data. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help interpret your findings:
- Which of my key categories have the lowest SoS score?
- Which products feature low on search results because they are out of stock?
- Are my competitors’ products faring better due to sponsored searches?
- Is my SoS low due to poor content quality?
With insights in hand, you will know which actions to take to drive the biggest impact. For example, you could increase sponsored search results or improve organic reach by optimizing product pages.

Understanding your SoS is essential to maximizing the awareness phase of your customer journey. It will help you improve your brand visibility and increase product conversions through better search and category presence.

2. Share of Media

Share of Media (SoM) is a KPI that is just as impactful, if not more so, than the SoS metric. However, only a limited number of brands track it or use it to drive strategic action. This makes it a perfect opportunity for brands looking to get an edge on the competition.

But what is SoM in digital shelf analytics? Essentially, it’s a way of measuring retail media advertising activities like brand-sponsored banners, listings, videos, ads, and promotions that sometimes blend into search results. The main types of retail media advertising exist in two categories: banner advertising and sponsored listings.

Banner advertising involves strategically placing designed banners within websites and search listings. These banners raise brand awareness and drive traffic to online storefronts.

Sponsored listings are paid placements within search results on search engines or eCommerce platforms. They are prioritized based on the total bid amount and the product’s relevance. These paid listings are marked with “sponsored” or “ad.”

It’s important to run these types of advertising campaigns on eCommerce platforms to gain customer visibility. In fact, “some 57% of US consumers started their online shopping searches on Amazon as of Q2 2023.” If you aren’t showing up, paying for placement can help.

These listings serve to enhance your brand’s overall visibility, help you gain more precise reach, increase conversions, and drive better brand awareness and recall with your customers.

These efforts aren’t free, however, so measuring their effectiveness is critical not only to gain all the listed benefits but to also not waste your valuable marketing budget. The SoM KPI can help a consumer brand answer questions like:
- Where are the opportunities to increase paid ads?
- Which categories could benefit from a promotional boost or a strategic and streamlined allocation of ad spend?
- Which of my competitors have active banners and what is their share of media by keyword?
- How has my ad spend trended historically in comparison to my competitor?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics (DSA) is among the first providers to offer Share of Media KPI tracking and analysis. This is because it requires advanced, multi-modal AI to gather, view, and aggregate listings that encompass text, images, and video. With Share of Media tracking facilitated by DataWeave, consumer brands can track and analyze the effectiveness of their own promotional investments as well as those of their competitors.

3. Content Quality

The content quality metric measures how well your product content adheres to the retailer’s specific guidelines, which are in place to steer traffic and sales on their sites.

With the help of a DSA platform’s AI and ML capabilities, you can measure different elements of your product detail pages (PDPs), such as titles, descriptions, images, videos, and even customer reviews. You need to know which elements are missing, where they are missing, and which ones are negatively affecting sales so you can take corrective action.

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%? The quality of your content can significantly impact this number. Ensuring that your content is high-quality will help influence product discoverability, customer engagement, and conversion rates. It will also help position you ahead of the competition. If your content quality is poor, you may find yourself with lower search rankings, a higher return rate, and more abandoned carts.

Here are some questions you can answer with the help of the content quality digital shelf metric:
- Is my product content at a retail site exactly what was syndicated?
- Are there any retailer initiated changes to my product content?
- Are my product content updates reflected on the retailer platforms?
- How well does my product content comply with the retailer guidelines?
- How do I optimize my product content for enhanced discoverability and conversion?
DataWeave’s content quality digital shelf analysis helps consumer brands ensure that product content on eCommerce platforms is high-quality and benchmark their product listings against the competition. It does this through a combination of AI-driven quality analysis and by presenting brands with actionable recommendations. These optimized suggestions are based on the top-performing products so you can focus your valuable time on the areas that will drive the biggest impact.

4. Pricing & Promotions

Your customers can easily shop around to find the best price for the product you’re selling. If your competitor is selling it cheaper, you’ll lose that sale.

That’s why it’s essential to understand the pricing and promotional landscape for each of your products and categories. This can be a challenge, especially if it’s a common product or comes in multiple pack sizes or variants.

It’s equally important to track pricing and promotions even at individual, physical stores. Doing so will allow you to remain competitive and responsive to local market dynamics by tailoring your pricing strategies based on regional competition. You don’t want your products to be overpriced (lost sales) or underpriced (lost profit) in specific markets.

Harmonizing insights when operating an omnichannel consumer brand is extremely difficult without the aid of a digital shelf analytics solution. Insights need to be aggregated between desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile applications, as well as from physical storefronts.

Questions you can answer with the help of the pricing & promotions digital shelf metric include:
- How do my product prices and promotions compare to my competitors?
- How consistent is my product pricing across retail websites?
- How does my product pricing vary across regions, ZIPs, and stores?
- How do price changes influence my sales numbers?
- Are there regional differences in pricing and promotion effectiveness?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics platform stands out with its sophisticated location-aware capabilities, which enable the aggregation and analysis of localized pricing and promotions. The platform defines locations based on a range of identifiers, such as latitudes and longitudes, regions, states, ZIP codes, or specific store numbers.

The platform can also extract promotional information, such as credit card-based or volume-based promotions. You can see variances across retailers, split by price groups, brands, and competitors. DataWeave specializes in enabling brands to conduct in-depth analyses across a wide array of attributes so you can answer just about any pricing or promotional question you have.

5. Availability

The availability KPI in digital shelf analytics measures the in-stock and availability rates for a brand’s products across eCommerce and physical locations. Similar to the pricing and promotions metric, it relies heavily on location awareness, down to individual stores. Measuring both online availability and offline in-stock rates will help you understand the big picture and take more informed replenishment action.

When you start leveraging the availability KPI with the help of digital shelf analytics, you can improve inventory management, boost product discoverability, increase the frequency with which your online product listings convert, and generally drive more sales. This KPI is essential for ensuring your customers can always find and buy the products they want.

With the availability KPI, you can start answering questions like:
- What is my overall in-stock rate?
- Which of my products frequently go out of stock?
- How does product availability vary across different regions and stores?
- What is the impact of availability on my conversion rates?
- Are there any seasonal trends in product availability that I need to address?
- How quickly are we resolving stockout issues across different locations?
- What are my biggest opportunities to reduce stockouts?
DataWeave enables consumer brands to track their product availability metric through automated data collection from various eCommerce platforms in conjunction with physical in-stock rates. The platform provides granular, store-level insights so you can understand regional stock variations and optimize inventory distribution. By tracking historical availability data, you can identify seasonal patterns and predict future demand to pre-empt stockout issues. All of this can be configured with automatic notifications to alert you when there has been a stockout event or when a low stock threshold has been passed, facilitating timely replenishment.

6. Ratings & Reviews

The final KPI in our guide is the ratings & reviews digital shelf metric. Consumers rely heavily on genuine feedback from their peers and refer to star ratings, posted comments, and uploaded pictures to inform their buying decisions. This KPI analyzes the impact of customer feedback and reviews on your products’ performance across eCommerce platforms so you can measure overall brand perception and isolate areas of opportunity.

This metric does something other digital shelf metrics don’t; it can inform your product strategy. It can help you identify repeat complaints that your product team can address with the manufacturer or use for the design of future products.

Some questions you can answer with this powerful KPI include:
- What is the overall customer sentiment towards my products based on ratings and reviews?
- Which product features are frequently mentioned positively or negatively by customers?
- How do my product ratings and reviews compare to those of my competitors?
- Are there common issues or complaints that need to be addressed to improve customer satisfaction?
- Which products have the highest and lowest ratings, and why?
With DataWeave’s digital ratings and reviews feature, you can keep a pulse on customer sentiment to take short-term action as well as decide long-term strategy. You can leverage reviews to influence product perception, refine products, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Metrics

Each one of these metrics is interconnected and collectively influences a brand’s success. For instance, improving content quality and earning higher ratings can significantly enhance your product’s visibility in search results, thereby boosting the Share of Search digital shelf metric. By focusing on a comprehensive approach that integrates these metrics, brands can ensure their products are consistently visible, competitively priced, well-reviewed, and readily available.

DataWeave gives consumer brands the means to execute a holistic digital shelf strategy. From a single portal, track and improve digital shelf metrics like Share of Search, Share of Media, Pricing and promotions, Availability, and Ratings and Reviews.

Our solutions help audit and optimize the most critical KPIs that drive sales and market share for brands so you can stay competitive in a dynamic digital landscape and foster long-term customer satisfaction.

Ready to get started? Schedule a call with a specialist to see how it can work for your brand.
August 21, 2024
Why Localized, Store-Specific Pricing and Availability Insights is Critical for Consumer Brands
Brands are becoming increasingly proficient in monitoring and refining their presence on online marketplaces, utilizing Digital Shelf Analytics to gather and analyze data on their online performance. These tools offer invaluable insights into enhancing visibility, adjusting pricing strategies, and improving content quality on eCommerce sites.

Yet, as the retail landscape shifts towards a more integrated omnichannel approach, it’s crucial for brands, particularly those in CPG, to apply similar strategies to their offline channels. For brands that count physical stores among their primary sales channels, gaining localized insights is key to boosting in-store sales performance.

Collecting shelf data from offline channels presents more challenges than online. Traditional methods, such as physical store visits, often fall short in reliability, timeliness, scale, and level of coverage.

However, the world of eCommerce provides a solution. As part of the effort to facilitate options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) for shoppers, major retailers make store-specific product details available online. Consumers often go online and select their nearest store to make purchases digitally before choosing a fulfillment option like picking up at the store or direct delivery. Aggregating this store-level information offers brands critical insights into pricing and inventory across a vast network of stores, enabling them to make informed decisions that improve pricing strategies and supply chain efficiency, thus minimizing stockouts in crucial markets.

Further, as consumers increasingly seek flexibility in how they receive their purchases—be it through in-store pickup, delivery, or shipping—brands need to adeptly monitor pricing and availability for these different fulfilment options. Such granular insight empowers brands to adapt swiftly and maintain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic retail environment.

Why does monitoring pricing and availability data across stores matter to brands?
- Hyperlocal Competitive Strategy: This allows brands to adjust their pricing strategies based on regional competition. By understanding the local market, brands can decide whether to position themselves as cost leaders or premium offerings. In particular, this is indispensable for Net Revenue Management (NRM) teams.
- Targeted Marketing Initiatives: Understanding regional price and availability enables brands to customize their marketing efforts for specific markets. By aligning their strategies with local demand trends and inventory levels, brands can more effectively engage their target audiences.
- Efficient Inventory Management: By keeping a close eye on store-level data, brands can better manage their stock, ensuring high-demand products are readily available while minimizing the risk of overstocking or running out of stock.
- Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Monitoring: While brands cannot directly control retail pricing, staying updated on pricing trends helps them adjust their MAP to reflect the competitive landscape, consumer expectations, cost considerations, and regional differences. A strategic approach to MAP management supports brand competitiveness and profitability in a fluctuating market.
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solutions equip brands with the necessary data and insights to do all of the above.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics is location-aware

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics platform stands out with its sophisticated location-aware capabilities, enabling the aggregation and analysis of localized pricing, promotions, and availability data. Our platform defines locations using a range of identifiers, including latitudes and longitudes, ZIP codes, or specific stores, and can aggregate this data for particular states or regions.

The strength of the platform lies in its robust data collection and processing framework, which operates seamlessly across thousands of stores and regions. This system is designed to operate at configurable intervals—daily, weekly, or monthly—allowing brands to keep a vigilant eye on product availability, pricing strategies, and delivery timelines based on the selected fulfillment option.

Unlike many other providers, who may provide limited insights from a sample of stores, our solution delivers exhaustive analytics from every storefront. This comprehensive approach grants brands a strategic edge, facilitating efficient inventory tracking, precise pricing adjustments, and rapid responses to fluctuating market dynamics. It cultivates brand consistency and loyalty by enabling brands to adapt proactively to the changing landscape.

Aggregated store-level digital shelf insights via DataWeave

In the summarized view shown above, a brand can track how its various products are positioned across stores and retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Meijer, and others in the US.

Using DataWeave, brands can easily see important metrics like availability levels, prices, and other metrics across these stores gaining immediate visibility without having to physically audit them. the brand can track the same metrics for products across competitor brands and inform its own pricing, stock, and assortment decisions.

Store-level availability insights

We provide a comprehensive view of product availability, highlighting the distribution of out-of-stock (OOS) scenarios across various retailers and pinpointing the availability status throughout a brand’s network of stores. This capability enables swift identification of widespread availability issues, offering a bird’s-eye view of where shortages are most pronounced. By simply hovering over a specific location, detailed information about stock status and pricing for individual stores becomes accessible.

Such insights are crucial for brands to adapt their strategies, mitigate risks, and ensure they meet consumer needs despite the ever-changing retail ecosystem.

Store-level pricing insights

Retailers often adopt different pricing strategies to deal with margin pressure, local competition, and surplus stock. Grasping these pricing dynamics at a hyperlocal level enables brands to tailor their strategies effectively to maintain a competitive edge.

Our platform offers an in-depth look at how prices vary among retailers, across different stores, and throughout various regions. This analysis reveals the nuanced pricing tactics employed by retailers on a regional scale.

For example, brands might see that some retailers, like Kroger and Walmart in the chart below, maintain consistent pricing across their outlets, demonstrating a uniform pricing strategy. In contrast, others, such as Meijer and Shoprite, might adjust their prices to match local market conditions, indicating a more localized approach to pricing.

With DataWeave, brands can dive deeper into the pricing landscape of a specific retailer, examining a price map that provides detailed information on pricing at the store level upon hovering over a given location.

By presenting a historical analysis of average selling prices across different retailers, we equip brands with the insights needed to understand past pricing strategies and anticipate future trends, helping them to strategize more effectively in an ever-evolving market.

Digital Shelf Analytics that work for both eCommerce and brick-and-mortar store data

While established brands have made strides in gathering online pricing and availability data through Digital Shelf Analytics solutions, integrating comprehensive insights from both brick-and-mortar and eCommerce channels often remains a challenge.

DataWeave stands out for its capacity to collect data across diverse digital platforms, including desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile applications. This capability ensures that omnichannel brands can have a holistic view of their pricing, promotional, and inventory strategies across all locations and digital landscapes.

Leveraging localized Digital Shelf Analytics to understand the intricacies of pricing and availability at the store level allows brands to fine-tune their approaches, swiftly adapt to local market shifts, and uphold a unified brand presence across the digital and offline spheres. This strategic agility places them in a favorable competitive position, enhancing customer satisfaction and trust, which are crucial for sustained success.

Know more about DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics here.

Schedule a call with a specialist to see how it can work for your brand.
April 3, 2024
From Data to Dollars: How Digital Shelf Analytics Drives Tangible Business Impact and ROI for Brands
For consumer brands, the digital marketplace presents an unparalleled landscape of opportunities for engaging with consumers and expanding their market presence. Within this dynamic environment, Digital Shelf Analytics has emerged as a crucial pillar in a brand’s eCommerce strategy. This technology provides valuable insights into a brand’s organic and paid visibility on marketplaces, content quality, pricing strategies, promotional efforts, and product availability. These insights help brands gain a comprehensive understanding of their competitive positioning and overall market performance.

Nevertheless, many brands often grapple with the question of whether this understanding translates into tangible actions that drive real business impact and return on investment (ROI). This uncertainty stems from a lack of clarity about the direct correlation between digital shelf insights and key metrics such as enhanced sales conversions.

Nonetheless, there is compelling evidence that when these insights are effectively harnessed and strategic actions are taken, brands can realize significant, measurable benefits.

So, the question arises: does Digital Shelf Analytics genuinely deliver on its promises?

At DataWeave, we’ve partnered with numerous brands to fuel their eCommerce growth through the application of digital shelf analytics. In this article, we will delve into these insights, uncovering the concrete and quantifiable results that brands can achieve through their investments in digital shelf analytics.

Digital Shelf KPIs and Their Impact

Digital Shelf Analytics is a robust system that analyzes specific key performance indicators (KPIs) about the digital shelf, furnishing brands with precise recommendations to not only bolster these KPIs but also to monitor the enhancements over time. The following is a brief explanation of digital shelf KPis and their expected impact areas:

Product Availability: Ensuring Shoppers Never Hear “Out of Stock” Again

Timely insights on the availability of products ensures brands reduce replenishment times at scale, which can significantly impact sales, creating an unbreakable link between product availability and revenue. With Digital Shelf Analytics, procurement and replenishment teams can set up notifications to promptly identify low or out-of-stock items and take swift action. This can also be done for specific ZIP codes or individual stores. In addition, availability plays a crucial role in a brand’s Share of Search and search rankings, as online marketplaces often ensure only in-stock products are shown among the top ranks.

Share of Search: Dominating the Digital Aisles

If a product isn’t visible, does it even exist? In fact, 70% of consumers never go beyond the first page of search results on major online marketplaces. Therefore, as a brand, the visibility of your products for relevant search keywords and their appearance on the first page can heavily determine your awareness metrics. This is where the concept of Share of Search comes into play. Think of it as securing prime shelf space in a physical store. Digital shelf insights and benchmarking with category leaders for Share of Search help ensure your products command relevant attention on the digital shelf.

Content Quality: Crafting the Perfect Product Story

Creating engaging product descriptions and visuals is akin to giving your products a megaphone in a crowded marketplace. By enhancing content quality, including product names, titles, descriptions, and images, brands can climb the search result rankings, leading to increased visibility and subsequently, more sales.

Ratings and Reviews: The Power of Social Proof

Public opinion holds immense sway. Research indicates that a single positive review can trigger a 10% surge in sales, while a multitude of favorable reviews can propel your product to a 44% higher trajectory. The correlation between ratings and sales is not surprising—each step up the rating ladder can translate to substantial revenue growth.

While it’s reasonable to anticipate a connection between these KPIs and downstream impact metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, we were driven to explore this correlation through the lens of real-world data. To do so, we meticulously monitored the digital shelf KPIs for one of our clients and analyzed the improvements in these metrics.

It’s essential to acknowledge that not all observed impact areas can be solely attributed to enhancements in digital shelf KPIs. Still, it’s evident that a robust correlation exists. The following section presents an in-depth case study, shedding light on the results of this analysis.

A Success Story: Real-World Impact of Digital Shelf Analytics

Let’s dive into the journey of one of our clients – a prominent CPG brand specializing in the sale of baked goods and desserts. Through their experience, we will illustrate the transformative impact of our DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics product suite.

Over a period of one year, from August 2022 to July 2023, the brand leveraged several key modules of Digital Shelf Analytics for Amazon, including Share of Search, Share of Category, Availability, Ratings and Reviews, and Content Audit. Each of these digital shelf KPIs played a vital role in shaping the brand’s performance across various stages of the buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey is typically delineated into three key stages:
- Awareness: At this stage, shoppers peruse multiple product options presented on search and category listing pages, gaining an initial understanding of the available choices.
- Consideration: Here, shoppers narrow down their selections and evaluate a handful of products, moving closer to a purchase decision.
- Conversion: In this final stage, shoppers make their ultimate product choice and proceed to complete the purchase.
Let’s now examine the data to understand how digital shelf KPIs helped drive tangible ROI on Amazon for the brand across the stages of the buyer journey.

Stage 1: Raising Awareness

Enhancing Share of Search and Share of Category can help brands boost product visibility and raise brand awareness. The following chart demonstrates the steady, incremental improvements in our client’s Share of Search and Share of Category (in the top 20 ranks of each listing page) throughout the analyzed period. These enhancements were achieved through various measures, including product sponsorship, content enhancement, price optimization, promotional initiatives, and more.

This amplified Share of Search and Share of Category directly translates into improved product discoverability, as evident from the surge in impressions depicted in the chart below.

Stage 2: All Things Considered

In the consideration stage, shoppers make their product selections by clicking on items that meet their criteria, which may include factors like average rating, number of ratings, price, product title, and images. For brands, this underscores the importance of crafting meticulously detailed product content and accumulating a substantial number of ratings.

The subsequent chart illustrates the year-long trend in both average ratings and the number of ratings, both of which have displayed steady improvement over time.

The enhancements in the number of ratings and the average rating have a direct and positive impact on product consideration. This, in turn, has led to a noticeable year-over-year increase in page views, as indicated in the chart below.

These improvements are likely to have also been influenced by the overall enhancement of content quality, which is detailed separately in the section below.

Stage 3: Driving Decisions

As buyers progress to the next stage, they reach the pivotal point of making a purchase decision. This decision is influenced by multiple factors, including product availability, content quality, and the quality of reviews, reflecting customer sentiment.

Our client effectively harnessed our Availability insights, significantly reducing the likelihood of potential out-of-stock scenarios and enhancing replenishment rates, as highlighted in the chart below. The same chart also indicates improvements in content quality, measured by the degree to which the content on Amazon aligns with the brand’s ideal content standards.

Below, you’ll find the year-over-year growth in conversion rates for the brand on Amazon. This metric stands as the ultimate measure of business impact, directly translating into increased revenue for brands.

As the data uncovers, growth in key digital shelf KPIs cumulatively had a strong correlation with impressions, page views, and conversion rates.

It is also important to note that the effect of each KPI cannot be viewed in isolation, since they are often interdependent. For example, improvement in content and availability could boost Share of Search. Accurate content could also influence more positive customer feedback. Brands need to consider optimizing digital shelf KPIs holistically to create sustained business impact.

Impact on eCommerce Sales

After the implementation of digital shelf analytics, the results spoke for themselves. Sales consistently outperformed the previous year’s records month after month. As shown in the chart below, the diligent application of DataWeave’s recommendations paved the way for an impressive 8.5% year-over-year increase in sales, leaving an indelible mark on the brand’s eCommerce success.

From boosting product visibility to catapulting conversion rates, Digital Shelf Analytics serves as the key to unlocking unparalleled online success.

While the success story detailed above does not establish a direct causation between Digital Shelf Analytics and sales revenue, there is undoubtedly a strong correlation. It’s evident that digital shelf KPIs play a pivotal role in optimizing a brand’s eCommerce performance across all stages of the buyer journey. Hence, for brands, it is vital that they collaborate with the right partner and harness digital shelf insights to fine-tune their eCommerce strategies and tactics.

That said, the eCommerce landscape is in a constant state of flux, and there is still much to learn about how each digital shelf KPI influences brand performance in the online realm. With more data and an increasing number of brands embracing Digital Shelf Analytics, it’s only a matter of time before a direct causation is firmly established.

Reach out to us today to know more about how your brand can leverage Digital Shelf Analytics to drive higher sales and market share in eCommerce.
October 16, 2023
It’s not easy being a Bakery Brand: Insights from Digital Shelf
By 2028, Fortune Business Insights projects that the global bakery products market will reach USD 590 billion. The CAGR (Compounded annual growth rate) for 2021-28 is estimated at 5.12%. Products in this segment include bread, buns, cookies, tortillas, salted snacks, English muffins, bagels, confectionery food, hot dogs, cakes, popcorn, and so on.

Due to disruptions in the global supply chain caused by lockdowns and border closures, the pandemic has had a negative impact on the demand for bakery products and snacks worldwide. However, the market is not only changing, but consumer demand is increasing. Post-pandemic, health, food, and safety have gained renewed attention.

People across the world are making healthier choices with a focus on wellness.

A growing number of people are interested in plant-based foods and beverages, reducing sugar consumption, and understanding the link between lifestyle and health, including obesity and diabetes. As a result of these trends, food producers are reshaping their product strategies to meet new consumer demands.

In this article, we take a look at the ways companies can leverage data to inform their e-commerce strategy.

What’s driving up the demand for bakery products?

More people are choosing easy-to-use bakery products and snacks over other foods due to urbanization, convenience, western diets, and women’s participation in the workforce. Additionally, innovations in baking systems, food technologies, ingredients, formulations, and product ideas are providing customers with a greater level of choice, flexibility, and freedom.

How is e-commerce changing the game for bakery product companies?

To optimize their supply chains, bakery food and snack companies must better understand e-commerce metrics given the wide variety of products available and eventually convert sales. There are several measures that companies need to pay attention to.

Stock availability metrics, discounts across locations, and share of search results – are all critical metrics companies need to track. In addition to providing manufacturers and retailers with an insight into the trends, DataWeave’s tools also allow them to make better business decisions and ultimately improve their bottom line.

Grocery Retailers and Bakery Brands tracked

Methodology
- Data Scrape period: February 2022 to September 2022
- Country: Canada
- Grocery Retailers tracked: Atlantic Superstore, Fortinos, InstaCart, Loblaws, Voila, Walmart Grocery, Zehrs.
- Bakery brands: Betty Crocker, Dempsters, Hostess, No Name, Presidents Choice, Quaker, Vachon, Doritos.
- Category tracked: Bread and Bakery, Chips, Crackers, Deserts, Snacks.
Share of Search Analysis

Which brands feature the most on e-commerce portals?

When listing items on e-commerce platforms, share of search is crucial. The highest share of the top ten or top twenty items available on these platforms is correlated with how many times the item may be viewed. As a result, it would have a greater chance of being selected by the customer.

By Retailer for Category “Desserts”

Share of Search for Brands in each retailer
- In Walmart Grocery, Vachon has the highest share of search at 41%, whereas Betty Crocker, Presidents Choice and No Name had the lowest share of search at 0%, in the Desserts Category.
- In Loblaws, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search of 34%, whereas Dempsters had the lowest share of search of 2% in the Desserts Category.
- The brand Presidents Choice consistently ranks high in the share of search results for Desserts across multiple retailers, including Atlantic Superstore, Fortinos, Instacart, Loblaws, and Zehrs – except at two retailers, Voila and Watlmart Grocery, where its share is zero.
Trend of Share of Search for “Desserts”

Share of Search analysis by Brands over Time in category “Desserts”
- Share of search had dropped by around 4% for No Name, whereas for Vachon, it increased by 3% from Jan’-22 to Sep’ 22
- By brands, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search at 42%, whereas Betty Crocker had the lowest share of search at 12% between Jan’ 22 and Sep’ 22 in the Desserts Category.
Availability Analysis

Which products are widely available across e-commerce portals?

The availability of the product on the e-commerce portal is one of the key indicators of meeting customer demand. Brands can use insights from DataWeave to strategize how to restock their inventory and ease customer demand. Based on data analysis, brands can also determine which products to prioritize on which platforms.

By Category

Availability analysis by Category over Time
- Availability of all five categories was around 52% in Feb’ 22, which steadily increased to 61% until Aug’ 22 and has reduced to reach 55% availability in Sep’ 22
- Sliced Bread category has seen the most drop in availability by 12% between Jun’ 22 and Sep’ 22
- The tortilla category has the most rise in availability. It has increased by 16% between Feb-22 and May-22. It also showed an overall rise in availability of 5% from Feb-22 to Sep-22
By Location

Availability analysis by Location and Category
- Across categories, Snacks & Candy had better availability at 73% than Bread & Bakery, with 56% availability.
- By Location, New Brunswick had more than 65% availability across all three categories; the closest Location is Nova Scotia, with 63% availability.
- Alberta had the highest availability of 100% in the Snacks & Candy category and the lowest availability of 21% overall in all three categories (weighted aggregate)
Discounts Analysis

Several discount-based insights can be studied on e-commerce platforms. From location-based trends, retailer-based trends, and manufacturer-based insights. These insights can help companies make the most of the revenue opportunity while creating an attractive value proposition for the retail consumer.

By Category

Discount analysis by Category
- Discounts of all three categories were around 24% in Feb’ 22, which steadily reduced to reach 15% in Sep’ 22
- Snacks, cookies & chips category has contributed the most to the drop in discounting, which dropped by 17% between Apr’ 22 and Sep’ 22
- The Tortilla Category does not have any discount in the month of Jul’ 22
By Retailer
- Discount on Bread & Bakery category in Walmart Grocery was around 9% in Feb’ 22. It steadily increased to 13% by Jun’ 22 and thereon reduced to reach 11% availability in Sep’ 22.
By Location
- Across Retailers, Nova Scotia had the highest availability of discounts at 22%, whereas New Brunswick had the lowest with discounts at 9% in Bread & Bakery category.
Discount analysis by Retailers and Locations – Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia
Note: Analysis does not cover all locations

Bakery and snack product manufacturers on e-commerce platforms have access to a rich trove of insights they can leverage to benchmark their strategies. They can better understand customer demands, align their supply chain and critically understand the trends impacting their bottom line. Engaging with a third-party platform like DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics can help brands unlock tremendous value.
December 3, 2022
5 Ways to Manage and Improve Stock Availability
Stock availability is the degree to which a brand or retailer has inventory of all their listed items to meet customer demand. Product availability becomes even more critical when they have to respond to unforeseen changes in demand and supply. To maintain the ideal stock availability levels for all items, they need robust inventory management tools to ensure real-time updates on current stock and accurate insights into upcoming demand.

However, managing stock availability is not a clear-cut science. Retailers must balance the change in demand and keep stock availability in check.

Why Stock Availability Matters

One of the challenges of running a retail business is to optimize inventory and associated costs. Maintaining stock availability in stores is critical for offline retail businesses. And when selling online, making sure products are available across different retailers and marketplaces can have a huge impact on sales and conversions.
1. Understocking: It’s when a brand’s product fails to meet consumer demand. If this happens often enough, customers may not return to the brand’s website or app because of the initial experience. Understocking is not a brand’s fault entirely since they might not always be able to anticipate a change in demand. However, it’s about a their ability to adapt to a quick change in the market trends through historical analysis and accurate forecasting.
2. Overstocking: It’s when a company orders too much inventory. Holding too much stock will lead to higher storage costs, shrinkage, and obsolescence losses. Another loss occurs if the brand can’t quickly sell the items — diminishing the value of the products.
We gathered data to see the impact of a short-term stockout on Amazon for one of our customers. Read more about what we uncovered & how deep the damage was, here.

7 Ways to improve stock availability

1. Collect Accurate Data

Availability across Brands and Categories

When multiple items are moving through a supply chain, companies can easily run into inventory inaccuracies. Discrepancies between the values of your system and the actual inventory of products can lead to understocking or overstocking. The best way to avoid discrepancies in inventory is to invest in an inventory management tool that gives you real-time updates on your stock. This is applicable for offline retail businesses.

2. Managing eCommerce inventory

Availability at Individual Product Level

Availability at Individual Product level by regions

Effective eCommerce inventory management is as important as making sure products are available in stores. Keeping track of your inventory levels and ensuring that you’re always well-stocked can avoid lost sales and keep your company running smoothly. Brands must ensure their stock is available across all the online platforms they sell. Access to real-time inventory data can help to keep a close eye on stock status across all marketplaces & retailers the product is available. Retailers also need to keep track of market trends to ensure they have the right inventory assortment to match customers’ demands.

3. Understand Consumer Demand

The only way to accurately predict future demand is to rely on historical data about your customer purchase trends. What do your customers purchase during holiday seasons? What are the upcoming trends in your category? Having data-backed answers to such questions will help brands and retailers properly stock up their inventory.

4. Adequate forecasting

Anticipating demand will help determine which products should be stocked during which seasons. Tracking past sales and metrics such as economic conditions, seasonality, peak buying months, and promotions will help brands predict demand. Analyzing such statistics will also help you get insights into the target market.

Availability across regions

5. Improve supplier relationships

It’s important to rely on a supply chain that delivers your shipment promptly. In fact, you should foster close relationships with your suppliers to trim costs and improve stock availability. You should be able to share key details such as future demands, so suppliers can ensure timely delivery.

Availability Analysis across Retailers and Categories

Consequences of Inefficient Inventory Management

What are the effects of overstocking?

Tied-up cash: Money spent on overstocking is tied-up money that your company could have put to better use. You can use it to pay off debts, wages, and rent. Inventory often has a limited shelf life due to material degradation, changing consumer trends, spoilage, and obsolescence.

Product expiration: If your brand offers time-sensitive goods or perishable items, overstocking can lead to product obsolescence and expiry. eCommerce platforms that also sell time-sensitive goods or grocery delivery apps are forced to sell products at below-margin prices to free up resources, leading to losses.

What are the effects of understocking?

Poor customer experience: Poor product availability will lead to low customer satisfaction & dropping customer loyalty.

Missed sales: Customers could gravitate towards the competition to make their current purchase if a product is unavailable at your online store. The more freequent the stockouts, the more lost sales.

Conclusion

To avoid the knock-on effects of overstocking and understocking, companies need a real-time view of their inventory, both online & offline. At DataWeave, we help companies decrease their latency period between stock replenishment and efficiently plan their supply chain. If you need help tracking your eCommerce product availability, reach out to the experts at DataWeave to know how we can help!
August 24, 2022
5 Ways DataWeave Helps Brands Drive Growth With Amazon Ads

Consumers are discovering and trialing new eCommerce marketplaces, brands and products at a faster rate than ever before, given the vast amount of choices encountered browsing for products online. A recent analysis shows how events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are especially fruitful for new-to-brand customer advertising, encouraging B2C marketers to increase their digital advertising spend to fuel product discovery, sales and market share for their brands.

DataWeave joins Amazon Advertising partner network

The majority of eCommerce consumers are discovering products via relevant keywords attributable to their needs, with most clicks happening on page one results for the first few products listed. Simplifying the digital shopping experience is critical for brands to be in the consideration set for the majority of consumers who won’t venture past page one results.

An internal analysis conducted shows getting a product to page one on retailer websites can improve sales by as much as 50 percent, but figuring out the right levers to pull to get there organically—without paid advertising—is a real challenge, especially given fast-changing algorithms. While more than half of all retail related online browsing sessions are “organic”, sometimes brands need to boost their product visibility by investing in sponsored (paid) opportunities to improve a product’s rank.

Data analytics can equip brands with intelligence to help them decide when, where, and how to make digital advertising investments profitably, while simultaneously acting on insights that help drive organic growth. Considering a majority of U.S. consumers begin their product discovery on marketplaces like Amazon, it makes sense for brands to prioritize digital advertising opportunities with Amazon.

Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads

Brands use Amazon Ads to drive brand awareness, acquire new customers, drive sales and gain market share, with the goal of furthering their marketing return on investment. Top performing advertisers average 40 percent greater year-on-year (YoY) sales growth, 50 percent greater YoY growth in customer product page viewership on Amazon, and 30 percent higher returns on ad spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads, according to a recent analysis. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display are among the types of Amazon Ads options cited that produce maximum return.

Ensuring your product listings appear at the top of page one results on Amazon for the most relevant discovery keywords is therefore the most important determinant for maximizing ROAS. DataWeave has become a vetted partner and measurement provider in the Amazon Advertising Partner Network, with the goal of supporting brands to optimize digital advertising campaigns by providing visibility to Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) key performance indicators (KPIs), like Share of Search, Pricing and Product Availability, Content Audits, Ratings and Reviews, and Sales Performance and Market Share.

Below is a summary of how our Digital Shelf solutions, in partnership with Amazon Ads, can improve the performance of your Amazon Ads campaigns

1. Keyword Recommendations Improve Share of Search

With the DataWeave Share of Search solution, brands can monitor their placement of both organic and paid discovery keywords relative to their competition. Once your keywords are determined, you are also provided a weighted Share of Search score that helps measure how well each keyword performs relative to product discoverability. Below is an example of insights you’d gain.

Share of Keyword Search

Brands can provide their own list of keywords to monitor, or through our Amazon Ads collaborative solution, learn which keywords are the “best” for them to measure in the realm of Amazon. Performance results are based on data that shows which keywords consumers are actually using when browsing online alongside other keywords brands request to measure. Users are able to see exactly which keywords are most popular, competitive (and even unexpected), and relevant at an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) level of granularity.

We can also estimate the degree of relevance and estimated traffic for the recommended keywords. Brands can then use these insights to adjust campaign strategies based on these parameters, which can boost product discoverability and rank visibility. A brand could assume people find its products by brand name, yet traffic insights may reveal a majority of people look for a generic product type before they end up buying that particular brand.

2. Content Audits Increase Discovery Relevancy Scores

Strong product content is critical to succeeding on Amazon. Thorough, accurate, and descriptive content leads to better click through rates (CTR), conversion rates, more positive reviews, and fewer returns, which results in increased discoverability. DataWeave’s Content Audit solution reviews existing copy and images on a per-attribute basis to highlight any gaps essential to improving visibility, as seen in the example below.

Content Analysis

To further growth, it is equally as important that your product content aligns with your advertising strategy. With Amazon Ads partner add-on, our solution can also audit your content to measure how effectively you are incorporating Amazon Ads keywords into your product content to enhance discovery relevancy.

3. Discover More Opportunities with Pricing and Product Availability Insights

Quality content and keyword updates will only get you so far if your products are not consistently available and priced competitively. With DataWeave’s Pricing and Promotions and Product Availability modules, advertisers can monitor their selling prices and availability trends alongside their competitors to uncover more opportunities to incorporate into advertising campaigns, as seen in the Pricing and Promotions dashboard example below.

Promotion Analysis

Additionally, product targeting recommendations can be utilized to target a competitor’s ASIN that may be overpriced or that is having issues staying in stock. Alternatively, broaden your strategy to target specific brands, complementary products, or category listing pages.

You can also create alerts on your own products to monitor when items are low on inventory or out of stock to ensure key products are consistently available when customers are shopping.

4. Leverage Ratings and Reviews to Increase Conversion

Product ratings and reviews are also a critical component to running a successful Amazon Ads campaign. A large number of reviews and a positive star rating will provide customers with the confidence to purchase, resulting in higher conversion rates. Conversely, negative feedback can have a detrimental impact, resulting in lost sales and wasted ad spend. DataWeave’s Ratings and Reviews module can help you monitor your reviews and extract attribute-level insights on your products. This information can then be utilized to further optimize your advertising strategy.

If you see consistent feedback in your reviews on aspects of a product not meeting customer expectations, address them in your product content to prevent potential misplaced expectations. Alternatively, if customer reviews are raving about certain product features, ensure these are promoted and relevant keywords are populated throughout your descriptions and feature bullets. Below is an example of insights seen within the DSA Ratings & Reviews dashboard.

Ratings and Reviews

5. Correlate Digital Shelf KPIs to Sales Performance and Market Share

The newest DSA module, Sales Performance and Market Share, provides SKU, sub-category, and brand-level sales and market share estimates on Amazon for brands and their competitors, via customer defined taxonomies, to easily benchmark performance results.

This data can also be correlated with other Digital Shelf KPIs, like Content Audit and Product Availability, giving brands an easy way to check the effect of attribute changes and how they impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how search rank, both organic and sponsored, affects sales and market share estimates.

Understanding the correlation between your advertising campaigns and your Digital Shelf brand visibility will help you identify which areas to prioritize to drive sales and win more market share.

Digital Shelf Insights Help Brands Win with Amazon Ads

The need for access to flexible, actionable eCommerce insights is growing exponentially as a way to help brands drive growth, increase their Share of Voice, and to gain a competitive edge. As a result, more global brands are seeking Digital Shelf Analytics for access to near real-time marketplace changes and to develop data-driven growth strategies that leverage pricing, merchandising, and competitive insights at scale.

By monitoring, measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like Sales Performance and Market Share, Share of Search, Content Audits, Product Availability, Pricing and Promotions and Ratings and Reviews alongside competitors, brands will know what actions to take to boost brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and online sales.

DataWeave’s acceptance into the Amazon Advertising Partner Network enables Amazon advertisers to effectively build their Amazon growth strategies and determine systems that enable faster and smarter advertising and marketing decision-making to optimize product discoverability and overall results.

Connect with us now to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs, or for access to more details regarding our Amazon Ads Partnership or Digital Shelf solutions.

UPDATED: Read the full press release here

August 23, 2022
Share of Keyword Search Cinco de Mayo 2022

As inflation continues to hike costs for consumers and supply chains challenge them to maintain loyalty, there is still an active audience willing to pay the ultimate price for the convenience of food and alcohol delivery. That being said, we analyzed 8 popular Retail and Delivery Intermediary websites and 11 popular ‘Cinco de Mayo’ keywords to see which Brands are predicted to win the battle of Digital Shelf Share of Search this holiday.

2022 Cinco de Mayo Share of Search Insights – Top Brands for ‘Cinco de Mayo’

Opportunities for Food & Bev on Cinco de Mayo

While most of our analysis focused on popular Cinco de Mayo food and beverage products, none of these brands populated on either Target (pictured on left below) or Walmart (pictured on right below) page 1 search results for the term ‘Cinco de Mayo’. Keyword search results for this term are dominated primarily by décor brands as indicated below.

Brands Achieving Top Share of Search for Food and Beverage Categories on Cinco de Mayo 2022

Share of Keyword Search Results – Alcohol Category

Three of the most popular alcohol types sought out during Cinco de Mayo are ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. Below are the brands dominating Share of Keyword Search results on each of the major retail websites we researched.

AmazonFresh, Meijer, Kroger, and Sam’s Club Share of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

We also reviewed the same keyword performance across popular delivery intermediaries to see how Share of Keyword Search altered for ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. The results are below for TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly and GoPuff:

TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly, and GoPuff of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

The keyword ‘Agave’ is also a popular search term within the alcohol category during the time leading up to Cinco de Mayo. We reviewed keyword search performance at various zip codes to see how price points that populated on page 1 search results varied given the change in median income. Below are the results:

Share of Search for Alcohol by Price Point and Zip Code on AmazonFresh

Share of Keyword Search Results – Grocery Categories

We also reviewed some of the most popular grocery items purchased during Cinco de Mayo by Keyword Share of Search results to see which brands are primed to win the Digital Shelf this year. Below are the results for Target.com and Walmart.com.

Walmart and Target Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

Below are the results for the same popular grocery items and alcohol keywords related to Cinco de Mayo and the page 1 results seen for Brand Share of Search on Safeway.com.

Safeway Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis, and let us know what other holiday insights you’d be interested in seeing this year. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

May 4, 2022
Valentine’s Day eCommerce Insights

Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.

February 11, 2022
How Brands Can Outperform Rivals With Next-Gen Digital Shelf Analytics

As eCommerce grows in complexity, brands need new ways to grow sales and market share. Right now, brands face urgent market pressures like out-of-stocks, an influx of new competition and rising inflation, all of which erode profitability. As online marketplaces mature, more brands need to make daily changes to their digital marketing strategies in response to these market pressures, shifts in demand, and competitive trends.

eMarketer forecasts 2021 U.S. eCommerce will rise nearly 18% year-over-year (vs. 6.3% for brick-and-mortar), led by apparel and accessories, furniture, food and beverage, and health and personal care. The eCommerce industry is also undergoing fundamental changes with newer entities emerging and traditional business models evolving to adapt to the changed environment. For example, sales for delivery intermediaries such as Doordash, Instacart, Shipt, and Uber have gone from $8.8 billion in 2019 to an estimated $35.3 billion by the end of 2021. Similarly, many brands have established or are building out a Direct to Consumer (D2C) model so they can fully own and control their customer’s experiences.

In response, DataWeave has launched the next generation of our Digital Shelf Analytics suite to help brands across retail categories directly address today’s costly market risks to drive eCommerce growth and gain a competitive advantage.

“Our new enhancements help brands improve online search rank visibility and quantify the impact of digital investments – especially in time for the busy holiday season.”
~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave

The latest product enhancements provide brands access to tailored dashboard views that track KPI achievements and trigger actionable alerts to improve online search rank visibility, protect product availability and optimize share of search 24/7. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics platform works seamlessly across all forms of eCommerce platforms and models – marketplaces, D2C websites and delivery intermediaries.

Dashboard for Multiple Functions

While all brands share a common objective of increasing sales and market share, their internal teams are often challenged to communicate and collaborate, given differing needs for competitive and performance data across varying job functions. As a result, teams face pressure to quickly grasp market trends and identify what’s holding their brands back.

In response, DataWeave now offers executive-level and customized scorecard views, tailored to each user’s job function, with the ability to measure and assess marketplace changes across a growing list of online retail channels for metrics that matter most to each user. This enhancement enables data democratization and internal alignment to support goal achievement, such as boosting share of category and content effectiveness. The KPIs show aggregated trends, plus granular reasons that help to explain why and where brands can improve.

Brands gain versatile insights serving users from executives to analysts and brand and customer managers.

Prioritized, Actionable Insights

As brands digitize more of their eCommerce and digital marketing processes, they accumulate an abundance of data to analyze to uncover actionable insights. This deluge of data makes it a challenge for brands to know exactly where to begin, create a strategy and determine the right KPIs to set to measure goal accomplishment.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics tool enables brands to effectively build a competitive online growth strategy. To boost online discoverability (Share of Search), brands can define their own product taxonomies across billions of data points aggregated across thousands of retailer websites. They can also create customized KPIs that track progress toward goal accomplishment, with the added capability of seeing recommended courses of action to take via email alerts when brands need to adjust their eCommerce plans for agility.

“Brands need an integrated view of how to improve their discoverability
and share of search by considering all touchpoints in the digital commerce ecosystem.”
~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave

Of vital importance, amid today’s global supply chain challenges, brands gain detailed analysis on product inventory and availability, as well as specific insights and alerts that prompt them to solve out-of-stocks faster, which Deloitte reports is a growing concern of consumers (75% are worried about out-of-stocks) this holiday season.

User and system generated alerts provide clarity to actionable steps to improving eCommerce effectiveness.

You also have visibility to store-level product availability, and are alerted to recurring out-of-stock experiences.

Scalable Insights – From Bird’s Eye to Granular Views

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics allows brands to achieve data accuracy at scale, including reliable insights from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. For example, you can see a granular view of one SKUs product content alongside availability, or you can monitor a group of SKUs, say your best selling ones, at a higher level view with the ability to drill down into more detail.

Brands can access flexible insights, ranging from strategic overviews to finer details explaining performance results.

Many brands struggle with an inability to scale from a hyper-local eCommerce strategy to a global strategy. Most tools available on the market solve for one or the other, addressing opportunities at either a store-level basis or top-down basis – but not both.

According to research by Boston Consulting Group and Google, advanced analytics and AI can drive more than 10% of sales growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, of which 5% comes directly from marketing. With DataWeave’s advanced analytics, AI and scalable insights, brands can set and follow global strategies while executing changes at a hyper-local level, using root-cause analysis to drill deeper into problems to find out why they are occurring.

As more brands embrace eCommerce and many retailers localize their online assortment strategies, the need for analytical flexibility and granular visibility to insights becomes increasingly important. Google reports that search terms “near me” and “where to buy” have increased by more than 200% among mobile users in the last few years, as consumers seek to buy online locally.

e-Retailers are now fine-tuning merchandising and promotional strategies at a hyper-local level based on differences seen in consumer’s localized search preferences, and DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution provides brands visibility to retailer execution changes in near real-time.

Competitive Benchmarking

Brand leaders cannot make sound decisions without considering external factors in the competitive landscape, including rival brands’ pricing, promotion, content, availability, ratings and reviews, and retailer assortment. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution allows you to monitor share of search, search rankings and compare content (assessing attributes like number of images, presence of video, image resolution, etc.) across all competitors, which helps brands make more informed marketing decisions.

Brands are also provided visibility into competitive insights at a granular level, allowing them to make actionable changes to their strategies to stay ahead of competitors’ moves. A new module called ‘Sales and Share’ now enables brands to benchmark sales performance alongside rivals’ and measure market share changes over time to evaluate and improve competitive positioning.

Monitor competitive activity, spot emerging threats and immediately see how your performance compares to all rivals’, targeting ways to outmaneuver the competition.

Sales & Market Share Estimates Correlated with Digital Shelf KPIs

In a brick-and-mortar world, brands often use point of sale (POS) based measurement solutions from third party providers, such as Nielsen, to estimate market share. In the digital world, it is extremely difficult to get such estimates given the number of ways online orders are fulfilled by retailers and obtained by consumers. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution now provides sales and market share estimates via customer defined taxonomy, for large retailers like Amazon. Competitive sales and market share estimates can also be obtained at a SKU level so brands can easily benchmark their performance results.

Additionally, sales and market share data can also be correlated with digital shelf KPIs. This gives an easy way for brands to check the effect of changes made to attributes, such as content and/or product availability, and how the changes impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how modified search efforts, both organic and sponsored, correspond to changes in sales and market share estimates.

Take Your Digital Shelf Growth to the Next Level

The importance of accessing flexible, actionable insights and responding in real-time is growing exponentially as online is poised to account for an increasing proportion of brands’ total sales. With 24/7 digital shelf accessibility among consumers comes 24/7 visibility and the responsibility for brands to address sales and digital marketing opportunities in real-time to attract and serve online shoppers around the clock.

Brands are turning to data analytics to address these new business opportunities, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, drive growth and gain a competitive advantage. Companies that adopt data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year, and DataWeave is here to help your organization adopt these practices. To capitalize on the global online shopping boom, brands must invest in a digital shelf analytics solution now to effectively build their growth strategies and track measurable KPIs.

DataWeave’s next-gen Digital Shelf Analytics enhancements now further a brand’s ability to monitor, analyze, and determine systems that enable faster and smarter decision-making and sales performance optimization. The results delight consumers by helping them find products they’re searching for, which boosts brand trust.

Connect with us to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs. No project or region is too big or small, and we can start where you want and scale up to help you stay agile and competitive.

November 30, 2021