Published on: October 7, 2022 | Last updated on: October 31, 2024 |
Standing out on the digital shelf means staying one step ahead of your competitors. But how do you know where to focus? What do today’s most successful ecommerce companies look like?
That’s where digital shelf analytics comes in.
In this article, we explore digital shelf analytics and discover why understanding it is essential for growing your brand online.
When it comes to online retail, the “digital shelf” refers to anywhere customers can view, assess and (hopefully) purchase your brand’s products.
Much like physical shelves in brick-and-mortar stores, the digital shelf represents all online spaces where your products might be, including but not limited to:
Keep in mind this applies to both your own website and accounts, as well as your whole network of distributors, resellers and stockists.
The digital shelf covers every point of interaction between customers and products online, making it crucial to how brands manage their ecommerce strategies.
Today’s consumers expect detailed product information to be instantly available, which means mastering the digital shelf is essential for brands hoping to grow online.
Digital shelf analytics is the process of gathering, analysing and optimising performance data for products being sold online.
As your brand vies for visibility, relevance and conversions, digital shelf analytics provides key insights to help you track and improve your key product listings across ecommerce sites, marketplaces and digital touchpoints.
While the digital shelf itself represents products’ availability and presence online, digital shelf analytics covers the tools and methods brands use to manage and optimise these factors and more.
Digital shelf analytics lets you gather insights that show just how well your products compete within various online retail environments, as well as where improvements can be made to help drive better results.
Digital shelf analytics works by gathering huge amounts of data on product listings, including visibility and various other performance metrics.
A typical step-by-step process includes:
Digital shelf analytics collects and monitors data on aspects such as:
It also tracks your competitors’ performance, giving you a clearer picture of how key items are performing against similar ones on the digital shelf.
Using advanced algorithms and machine learning, digital shelf analytics platforms process and interpret collected data.
They assess things like how effectively product listings match search queries, reveal where products rank on digital shelves across various ecommerce channels, and identify issues like out-of-stock items and uncompetitive pricing.
Once data is collected and analysed, digital shelf analytics consolidates the findings into reports and interactive dashboards, so your brand can visualise important data trends, identify relevant opportunities and make meaningful changes.
For example, you might see where product descriptions need refreshing, which of your target keywords are underutilised, or where competitors are outperforming your brand in search results.
In a crowded ecommerce landscape, digital shelf analytics can help brands address numerous challenges, including:
By understanding how well your products rank for specific keywords and targeting them accordingly, you can improve your brand’s visibility and help make your products easier to find.
Digital shelf analytics helps detect inconsistencies in your product data and information, ensuring things like descriptions, pricing and media are brand compliant across your third-party retailers.
Providing insights into product performance, you can optimise your brand content, adjust pricing or add relevant keywords to your target list, all of which make listings more appealing and will help increase conversion rates.
Digital shelf analytics gives competitive insights so you can see where your rivals are outpacing you, helping inform future strategies around tricky areas like pricing and promotions.
By tracking reviews, ratings and feedback, you can make data-driven decisions that enhance buyers’ experience, thereby quickly rebuilding loyalty to your brand.
With digital shelf analytics, you can make your products more visible online, thereby increasing their overall discoverability.
At the same time, monitoring competitor data alongside your own will help you identify where best to improve. This is done by obtaining key insights that can then inform both content optimisation and campaign targeting
If you have an ecommerce business and partner with various internet retailers, digital shelf analytics are crucial to maintaining your competitive position in the online marketplace.
Although technically any business who has digital products can benefit from digital shelf analytics, it’s the bigger businesses who will see the most value.
The bigger you are, the more automated a solution you need. Manual collection of large data sets will be unmanageable, prone to error, and would consume vast amounts of business hours.
Some of the industries that would best benefit from digital shelf analytics include:
Using an effective digital shelf analytics platform like Magpie DBX lets you keep track of any inconsistencies with your brand, enabling you to monitor how these discrepancies appear across multiple channels.
Looking at a wide range of online components, digital shelf analytics pinpoint metrics based around attracting consumer attention. These include:
This measures how easily customers can find your products through category pages and search results. Digital analytics tools track category and keyword rankings, search relevance and search result placements, providing insights into how visible products are across different channels. Doing so helps brands optimise their listings to appear more prominently in customer searches, boosting traffic and potential sales.
Content accuracy ensures that all product listings are correct, complete and up-to-date. Digital shelf analytics helps achieve this by monitoring product descriptions, specs, images and even compliance requirements, identifying discrepancies or outdated content. This helps build trust and reduce returns amongst customers who rely on such information when making purchase decisions.
Pricing analytics focus on monitoring price consistency, competitiveness and compliance. Digital shelf analytics track pricing trends across marketplaces, helping brands align their strategies with market trends and adjust pricing accordingly.
Stock and availability metrics provide insights into inventor levels across platforms, alerting you to out-of-stock situations and ensuring that products are consistently available to meet customer demand.
By analysing stock data, you can address inventory issues proactively, reducing the risk of lost sales and maintaining a positive customer experience.
Ratings and reviews offer crucial insight into customer mindsets when encountering your products, influencing their credibility and appeal. Digital shelf analytics collects and analyses review data, helping you identify trends in customer sentiment, address negative feedback and prioritise improvements based on direct buyer insights.
This tracks the performance and impact of promotional campaigns, including discounts, bundles or special offers. With digital shelf analytics, you get insights into how promotions affect visibility, sales volume and competitive positioning, allowing you to refine future strategies to increase conversion rates and maximise ROI on promotional spend.
Reporting and intelligence gather and synthesise all the data collected across the digital shelf, offering a consolidated view of your brand’s performance through dashboards and reports. Advanced analytics tools generate real-time insights and trend analyses, enabling brands to make data-driven decisions that enhance ecommerce strategies.
Some of the most important aspects of digital shelf analytics software include:
Wide-ranging coverage is key for tracking product performance across multiple ecommerce platforms and marketplaces. Just make sure whatever digital shelf analytics software you choose supports all the channels where your products are sold. With Magpie DBX, for instance, we currently collect data in over 50 countries, and are always looking to expand our reach.
On the digital shelf, data that’s even a day old could be outdated! Your digital shelf analytics software should be able to crawl and retrieve data efficiently, ideally with on the day results.
Rapid data refresh allows for timely adjustments to strategies that guarantee your team always has accurate information, especially during key retail periods like product launches, promotions or seasonal sales.
Having accurate, consistent data should be top priority for your brand. High-quality digital shelf analytics software emphasises precise, regularly updated and reliable metrics across all channels, helping to prevent misguided strategies and missed opportunities.
Effective digital shelf analytics software should offer flexible data integration options, allowing you to extract the most relevant insights and incorporate them into your existing systems and workflows. These include:
User-friendly digital shelf analytics makes a huge difference in productivity and adoption across teams. You don’t want clunky software!
Look for platforms that prioritise:
As your business grows, your digital shelf analytics solution should grow with you. Whether you’re expanding to new markets, adding more products or onboarding new team members, a scalable platform should accommodate increased data loads and users.
While cost is a factor when choosing digital shelf analytics software, look for a solution that balances pricing with robust functionality that aligns with the needs of your business without sacrificing essential features.
Do you have multiple listings across different ecommerce platforms, but struggle to maintain consistency in product information, pricing or availability?
Failing to track how your products rank in search results, or can’t understand what factors are affecting your online sales performance?
Are you under-resourced when it comes to analysing competitor trends or customer reviews, with no way of meaningfully moving your digital shelf strategy forward?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should look for a digital shelf analytics solution.
Helping you win at the digital shelf, Magpie DBX is equipped with all the necessary tools to collect and analyse huge data sets, as well as providing valuable insights into which areas of your ecommerce business need improvement.
We can even tailor the platform to your specific business needs/criteria, so you’re always receiving the most relevant data.
To find out more about how Magpie DBX can assist with streamlining your digital shelf analytics, get in touch today and book a demo!
Shoppers love looking at things, and if you want your business to succeed, you’d better make sure your products are as appealing across the digital shelf – where they’re housed online – as they are within a physical retail space.
Appearing on the digital shelf involves more than just listing your products across multiple channels.
It’s about making sure that you’re presenting them in the right way, so that customers will keep using your brand because they trust that you can deliver.
But retaining customers means first maximising your digital shelf visibility, which is tricky given how crowded the online space has become.
In this article, we look at why digital shelf visibility is so important, as well as suggesting ways of appearing more visible across the internet.
One of the most important aspects of e-commerce is success on the digital shelf. But how do you make those crucial online gains your business needs to survive?
The digital shelf is where you get noticed, the place where your brand has the most opportunity to shine. And with an increasing number of people shopping online, knowing how to win at the digital shelf could be what catapults your company to a whole new level.
In this article, we show you how to win at the digital shelf, including ways that Magpie DBX can help your business shoot for the (virtual) stars.
Want to learn more about how Magpie DBX can help your business? Get in touch with us and let us show you!
