Analytics has been a buzz word ever since the 1960s. Everybody wants their hands-on good data to derive on brilliant business strategies. Today, data collection is frowned upon, but it is still happening, nonetheless. Data collection is easy when you own the site but can be a challenge when you are at the mercy of other platforms.
With the rise of e-commerce and the countless number of marketplaces, online stores and apps this challenge is getting bigger by the day. Today you not only track what happens on your site, but you also need to know what is going on in Noon, Amazon, Instacart, NowNow etc.
Let’s start with some very basic search results. We all know that being on the first page on search increases the purchase probability by 15-30 per cent based on the product and price. But let’s think this through, on a laptop, you get to see roughly 10 listings, on a mobile that number is 4-5 and now when you ask Alexa to add something to your cart, that number is 1.
So, you are no longer optimizing to be on the first page, you want to be number 1. To get there you not only need a perfect page but a competitive price, a brand recall value, a stable number of orders and more.
As you can see, just one search result will need the entire team to work in sync. This is where a lot of smaller sellers & manufactures are winning. They are looking at data and making changes on the fly. Small-time manufacturers are producing high demands goods faster and flooding the market in no time.
Today e-commerce analytics is more than just a tool or a service to give you insight, it is an entire team that analyzes the data and uses that information to take actions that has far-reaching consequences. At any given point of time in any market, there are at least 10 different platforms that need to be tracked. As reported by Profitero, for 51% of brands, “measuring and reporting on how e-commerce is performing as a distribution channel” is a top challenge.
So, what are the most important things a brand needs to look at while planning their e-commerce strategy?
Well, in my opinion, there are 5 pillars to e-commerce analytics success
- Discoverability: Understand how the end-users are discovering about your product on the platforms. These will depend on product listings, product targeting, position on search results, pricing and discounts and SKU availability.
- Availability: Understand if your product is in stock across your region. This needs to be checked in SKU level. For example, people in Dubai might buy a 400ml shampoo bottle more frequently and people from Abu Dhabi might buy the 200ml bottle more. With this information, you can work to get your stock availably accordingly.
- Visibility: It is becoming a practice for end-user to go directly to their preferred platform and window shop or search for a product directly on the platform bypassing Google. It, therefore, becomes important to be visible. Promotions, flash sales, sponsored ads, location-based targeting etc. are some tools that get very handy.
- Performance: We all know how important reviews can be. Products will good and recent reviews can garner more sales than others. So, strive to get reviews from your users on the platform and outside. Researching a product is a norm today and good content can go a long way. Pay special attention to counterfeit detection if you are selling a novelty item. Bad product with your brand name on it can set you back a lot.
- Execution compliance: After looking at all the points above you must ensure your product is ready for the platform algorithm. In other words, you want the perfect page so that the algorithm picks it up every time. This is called the perfect page analysis. Ensuring your page has the right title, description, HD images, videos, FAQs etc. can increase the probability of sales by another 30 per cent.
Trying to do everything yourself can be a tiresome and quite frankly a monumental task. To stop this, you might want to even track what your competition is doing and get ahead of the game. There are loads of tools available that can help you with this and you should use them to your advantage.
The e-commerce space is heating up and if you are a brand, a small-time seller or a manufacturer, you would want to pay attention to e-commerce analytics more than ever.
Happy Selling!
