KPIs are more important than ever for brands. But given the scope of the digital shelf, it can be hard to pin down exactly how your brand is doing. One of the goals of digital shelf analytics should always be to evaluate whether your efforts are ultimately improving your position on the shelf and working toward your overarching goals.
Digital shelf metrics show you how specific business activities have performed. Impressions. Click through rates. Ratings. Conversion rates. This data helps you evaluate the success or failure of marketing assets and campaigns, the effect of changes to your product page, and how to fine-tune similar efforts in the future.
But key performance indicators (KPIs) go beyond this tactical information to help you see the big picture. They connect your efforts to larger goals, like growth in particular customer segments, adoption of specific customer behavior, improvement in an area you’ve been focusing on.
As you analyze the digital shelf, it’s important to put the information you’re seeing in the context of your goals. Here are just a few examples of digital shelf analytics KPIs you might use.
Organic Share of Search
When your products rank for key terms and product categories on retailer search engines, it continually yields sales. People search for products like yours, find your brand, and buy from you instead of a competitor. Best of all: you don’t have to pay to show up in the search results. PriceSpider’s digital shelf analytics solution, Brand Monitor, automatically tracks your product pages’ positions in search results over time for their target keywords. From the dashboard, you can set the date range and compare your month-to-month or quarterly change in organic Share of Search.
If one of your brand’s goals is to increase your discoverability or improve your position on the digital shelf, then measuring the percent growth in organic Share of Search needs to be one of your DSA KPIs.
YoY shoppable media sales
Shoppable media is taking ecommerce by storm. Consumers are looking for convenient, seamless shopping experiences so that when they see something they want, they can get it from the retailers they already trust (and have accounts with). Shoppable media facilitates these experiences, blurring the line between content and shopping, enabling consumers to select from a range of buying options right from your ads, videos, posts, articles, and other content.
This is a rapidly growing area within ecommerce. As your brand adopts the necessary technology and dedicates resources to it, the sales that come from shoppable campaigns and assets should increase every year. A percent increase in YoY shoppable media sales indicates that your brand is becoming more accessible from more channels.
PriceSpider’s shoppable media solution, Where to Buy, makes it easy to track every sale from your shoppable assets, regardless of what website those sales take place on. (Learn more about our universal tracking.)
Brand compliance
Brand integrity is critical to long-term success, especially as your brand grows and becomes available through more sellers. It’s also notoriously difficult to maintain, as every new seller has the potential to create a different perception of your brand. In ecommerce, product pages are one of the most problematic areas when it comes to brand integrity. But how do you even quantify something as enigmatic as “brand integrity”?
Brand Monitor makes this fairly straightforward. Using your established brand guidelines for every product, Brand Monitor crawls every page your SKUs are listed on, comparing the text, images, and other content to your guidelines. Then it assigns each page a score based on how well it complies with the guidelines.
If improving your brand integrity is a major goal for your business, brand compliance score is an excellent DSA KPI.
Saved ad spend
Nobody likes to waste money. But ecommerce brands do it all the time, directing a portion of their ad spend to product pages that are out of stock. Nobody can buy your product when it isn’t available, and these customers will probably wind up buying the next best thing: a competitor’s product. At best, they’ll just leave.
Either way, that ad spend could be put to much better use on a product that’s still in stock. The problem is most brands aren’t equipped to identify or react to this waste. It’s too difficult to manually coordinate ad spend around stock availability. This is another area where Brand Monitor can help you work towards goals like using your ad spend more efficiently or running a leaner marketing budget. When a product goes out-of-stock, Brand Monitor sends you an alert, so you can temporarily turn off any ads pointing to it.
As salvaging your wasted ad spend becomes a regular part of your DSA routine, you’ll want to track your increase in saved ad spend over time.
Demonstrate your success on the digital shelf
Without advanced third-party tools, brands don’t get much visibility into how their products are performing on retail sites. PriceSpider’s Brand Monitor gives you deep visibility into the digital shelf and helps you recognize progress toward your business goals. Wherever your products appear, our specialized brand monitoring software equips you to evaluate where you’re improving and where there’s room for more growth.
Want to see Brand Monitor’s DSA capabilities in action?
