Mini Guide: Demystifying ecommerce Performance Metrics

Winning the digital shelf means being able to monitor and manage ecommerce performance metrics across channels. To help your team succeed, we simplified the common challenges to digital shelf reporting and the solution within a mini guide, “Demystifying ecommerce Performance Metrics.” Access the mini guide via the link below or keep reading to learn more about winning the digital shelf.

What is the digital shelf?

When you make an in-store purchase decision, you might hold a product, review its label, or evaluate it based on adjacent products on the physical shelf. The digital shelf is the online presence of a product or brand. The digital shelf consists of wherever consumers can learn more about products and make purchases across websites, retail channels, social media, mobile applications, and other digital channels. It includes all of the content and information that is available about the product or brand online, including the product content such as images and features and benefits, the reviews and ratings, pricing, and other information that is visible to potential buyers when they are exploring a purchase.

How your brand or products are represented online impacts the consumer buying decision. This information enables them to research and compare products, explore reviews and ratings, and make informed decisions about what to buy. For businesses, having a strong digital shelf presence can be critical to driving online sales and building brand awareness.

How to win the digital shelf

To win the digital shelf, you must build a strong online presence for your products or brand. Here are some strategies you can use:

1. Create high-quality content. Your written and visual product content used on your website and across retailer websites will attract and help customers make an informed purchase decision. Develop a content marketing strategy to govern the creation and maintenance of valuable, informative, and engaging content that will attract and retain customers.
2. Optimize your website. Make sure your website is well-designed, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly to ensure your brand is represented in a positive light and to improve the likelihood of customer purchase. Use SEO techniques such as keyword research and on-page optimization to make your website more visible to search engines. And practice user experience (UX) best practices, like simple and uncluttered design, consistent and clear branding, and high-quality images and graphics.
3. Optimize listings across retail ecommerce channels. Beyond your website and owned channels, you need to optimize your brand and product listings across the other channels where your products are sold indirectly to consumers, such as on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, Home Depot, and more.
4. Use social media. Use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to connect with your customers and promote your products. Engage with your followers and respond to comments and reviews to build a loyal customer base and expand your reach with influencer marketing strategies.
5. Leverage paid advertising: Use paid advertising platforms and retail media networks to reach a larger audience and drive traffic to your website, brand, and product listings.
6. Gather and analyze customer feedback: Monitor online reviews and ratings to understand how customers feel about your products and use this feedback to make improvements and drive sales.

By implementing these strategies, you can improve your digital shelf presence and increase the visibility of your products or brand online. However, what’s equally important to your strategy is being able to monitor and measure ecommerce performance metrics. You can’t win what you can’t measure.

Managing digital shelf performance

Managing and monitoring the digital shelf is a challenging task, as it involves keeping track of your brands and products and sales across multiple digital channels. This means being able to monitor and make changes on each channel, including making sure your information is accurate and up-to-date, your pricing competitive, margins are low, customers are satisfied, inventory is available, your operations and supply chain are profitable, and that you’re meeting your goals.

The digital shelf is constantly evolving as new products, brands, and information are added online, and existing content is updated or removed. In general, it’s important for businesses to regularly review and update your digital shelf performance to ensure your products and brand are optimally represented and sold online. To effectively and efficiently manage and monitor the digital shelf, it’s important to have a clear strategy and set of goals, and use the tools and technologies to track and measure your ecommerce performance as quickly as the digital shelf changes. Otherwise, ecommerce reporting can get in the way of your team’s success. In fact, 33% of a team’s time is spent on data preparation according to Alteryx.

Manual digital shelf performance management or gathering data from each source, combining it and analyzing insights isn’t a viable option because it’s time-consuming, prone to errors, it can’t keep up with the speed the shelf changes and it isn’t scalable. For most teams, it’s more effective to automate the data collection and analysis of your digital shelf performance.

How to win the digital shelf

The most critical ecommerce metric for measuring your digital shelf presence and performance is sales. Tracking your and your competitor’s cross-channel sales is one of the most important ways to win the digital shelf. Aside from sales, there are 8 other ecommerce dimensions you need to win the digital shelf:

1. Brand Strength and Awareness – How aware customers are of your brand as indicated by volume of branded searches relative to each other
2. Share of Voice – How your brand’s presence and discoverability compares to your competitors
3. Advertising Incrementality – The true dollar impact of advertising spend, representing sales that would not have taken place without advertising spend
4. Product Availability – How often your SKUs are unavailable
5. Price Leadership – The products and brands leading pricing in your category across various price points
6. Content Authority – How accurate, complete, optimized, and compliant your product detail pages are
7. Customer Sentiment – How customers are rating and reviewing your products
8. Assortment Strength – The coverage opportunity of your brand and products across relevant categories

You can’t win what you can’t measure, which is why digital shelf analytics become so critical to a company’s ecommerce success.

Access “Demystifying Digital Shelf Performance” mini guide now

Digital shelf management is a complex but pertinent nut to crack for many companies, because you simply can’t win or improve what you can’t measure. To help make this common challenge a little easier to navigate, we’ve produced a quick mini guide around why digital shelf performance matters and how to best go about measuring ecommerce performance metrics in, “Demystifying Digital Shelf Performance.”

Access it now to learn:

• The top 5 ecommerce reporting challenges
• The hidden costs of poor digital shelf performance
• What is digital shelf analytics
• The ecommerce metrics digital shelf analytics tools can help your team monitor and measure
• And, how much you can reduce reporting costs with digital shelf analytics

Open the mini guide now!