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Analytics: The “ultimate critic” for delivering content success

READ TIME: 5 MINUTES
July 09, 2021

It’s one of the many things that keeps a digital marketer up at night: “Where does my product come up when someone searches on Amazon?” Which can lead to others: “Does my product appear on the actual PDP?” and “Is my product listed as available to buy?” It can be a downward spiral from there: “Is my product even listed?” “Am I winning the buy box?” “If not, why?”

Answers to these questions are difficult to manage manually. It’s a tough task for analysts, and if you manage more than one or two products (on only one or two sites), it becomes daunting. Imagine having thousands of products across dozens of retailers, where understanding these data points is just a small part of your responsibilities…

In today’s omni-channel marketplace, it is understood that brands need complete core product information along with enhanced content to drive engagement. But analytics are often overlooked, due to time constraints, confusion on what to analyze, or budgets stuck in other departments. However, analytics are what enable brands and retailers to critique and then optimize their approach. If core content is an item’s ingredients, and enhanced content is the ‘sizzle’, then analytics is the ‘restaurant critic’ that can tell you where you’re succeeding and where you’re not up to standard.

ANALYTICS, IN 6 QUESTIONS

For eCommerce product marketers, there are six critical questions you need to first ask and then stay on, when understanding how to optimize your products’ performance. We’ve got the guide right here.

Those familiar with the online world are comfortable with the tools available to measure performance. Things like SEO, page analytics, backlink tracking and many other measures are critical for monitoring and optimizing your success. Anyone working in physical retail would have to have information on item-by-item availability and performance. It is no different when analyzing items selling on an eCommerce site. Having a deep and connected network of analytical tools ensures that you can understand performance and make any real-time changes to improve your shopper engagement.

When considering the analytics tools available to you, there are three main categories.

Web analytics. Whether it is industry standards like Google or more custom tools for evaluating enhanced rich media content for products sold online, understanding what is out there is important. For suppliers, using enhanced content tools to understand what is being presented or promoted by brand or by retail site is required. This is ensures that your content meets readiness standards for recipients, as well as helping you to understand what your competitor brands have available and are promoting.

Retailers also need to understand readiness from the opposite point of view – being able to see the categories and brands that meet requirements and that are therefore ready to present well to customers. Highlighting these brands to shoppers is a good approach that helps raise the overall content quality site-wide.

CONTENT READINESS AND CONTENT HEALTH: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

The terms “content readiness” and “content health” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they’re very different. When referring to readiness, this indicates a yes-or-no state and is very tactical Does the content include the bare minimum requirements to be accepted by a recipient? Note, each recipient may have different readiness requirements. If yes, then the content is ready to be submitted.

Content health, on the other hand, is a more strategic analysis that evaluates the overall quality of an item’s complete submission, beyond core requirements. Examples of this would be whether there are more than the minimum number of images included on your PDP, or does your PDP include videos , 4- and 5-star reviews (or 1-star reviews) – all of which affect your page performance, etc. Content health is a critical measurement for both retailers and suppliers to enable a more shared understanding of the quality of the overall PDP, allowing both sides to work towards increasing traffic, conversion and sales.

Digital shelf analytics. This second classification of analytics refers to the myriad of tools that can evaluate content in the way that a shopper might see it. By taking a point-in-time snapshot, these reports give brands and retailers a “reality check”, into what consumers are seeing online for your products and how you measure against the competition. Content Integrity audits are a good example. These reports help to identify whether your brand is “live” on recipient sites and whether the exact optimizations you syndicated have made it to the retailer’s website.

Other reports can show items that are listed as Out of Stock; or who is owning the Buy Box; or who is winning on in-site search; or pricing intelligence, including whether the listed amount in an affiliate site ‘buy box’ is within a brand’s parameter.

See the different analytics and reporting options available through CXH

REPORTING

  • Content Integrity Audits (Is it Live?)
  • Click & Collect – Zip Code Tracking
  • Pricing Intelligence
  • Comprehensive Dashboard

ANALYTICS

  • Content Health Scorecards
  • Onsite Rankings (Search & Browse)
  • Buy Box & Out of Stock
  • Ratings & Reviews

Vendor analytics. Finally, the third level of analytics can be used by retailers to understand the ‘behind the scenes’ aspects of content from a holistic point of view to keep all their vendors headed in the right direction. A great example of this is Target’s implementation of their VendorSCOR program, which more closely monitors their vendors’ content health, to help ensure consistency across the Target.com branded site, by supplier. This is an example of Content Health measurements (see sidebar), which can give deeper context to the quality of an item’s content.

By combining product information with several types of content analytics, it is possible to optimize product content to drive eCommerce sales. By using a combination of web, digital shelf and vendor analytics, both suppliers and recipients can more closely monitor product performance. With Syndigo’s analytics and reporting capabilities available through CXH, it’s easy to understand product and site performance at a much deeper level.

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