Cereal and milk, campfires and smores, movie theaters and popcorn. Sometimes, certain things just go better together. After all, who could imagine enjoying a film without a tub of warm, crunchy, buttery popcorn? And hey, even if you’re not a fan of heated and salted corn kernels, you’ve gotta admit—they look (and smell) delicious.
Another great combo? Brands and retailer data. Securely sharing key data points with your brands can improve your relationship with them, help them sell more products through your store, and subsequently increase your traffic.
But of course, when it comes to sharing data, many retailers understandably keep their cards close to the vest. Your customer data and digital shelf metrics are your secret ingredients. They’re also one of the driving forces behind major decisions about improving your customer experience and increasing your bottom line.
So, you can’t let your data fall into the wrong hands. But the problem some retailers have is that they don’t let the right data fall into the right hands, either.
In ecommerce, there’s a massive gap between what brands know about their digital shelf performance and what retailers know. When brands send you traffic through their website, ads, social posts, emails, and other channels, they don’t know how well it converts or what people buy—even if you’re already sharing item details in category management meetings or through an affiliate program.
PriceSpider closes this gap by showing both brands and retailers what happens after someone clicks through to your site from their Where to Buy tool. Wherever a brand uses Where to Buy to direct traffic to one of our data-sharing retailer partners, they can track what consumers purchase after they click, giving them a wealth of insights into their performance. Retail giants like Amazon, Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and Best Buy are among the 1,500+ retailers that make this data available to brands through PriceSpider.
Why should you care? If you’re not partnering with PriceSpider to share conversion data with brands, you’re missing out in several significant ways. In this article, we’ll walk you through:
- How sharing data with PriceSpider means more web traffic for you
- How it improves relationships with your brands
- What you’ll learn through our unique reports
- How we ensure you retain the rights to your data
Becoming a data-sharing partner with PriceSpider doesn’t cost you a thing. Not becoming a partner, though? You’ll be missing out. Here are some of the top reasons you should become a data-sharing partner with PriceSpider today.
You’ll get more (and better) traffic
Sharing your data with brands can give your online store an immediate boost in traffic. There are a few reasons why this happens.
Brands send more online traffic to retailers that partner with PriceSpider
At the end of the day, marketers have KPIs they’re accountable for. They need to prove that their efforts produced worthwhile results. And if you’re not sharing data with them—data that connects their campaigns and assets to actual sales of the brand’s products—then they can’t use sales on your site to validate their decisions. Even if they focus their efforts on driving traffic to your site, and there’s an uptick in sales through your store at the end of the quarter, if you’re not sharing item-level data, it’s more difficult to trace those sales back to a specific email, ad, post, or campaign.
And that’s why our brands usually prioritize sending their traffic to retailers that share data. They can measure their performance and justify their business decisions. As soon as you become a data-sharing partner with us, they can incorporate you in their marketing campaigns.
You don’t even have to tell them—we’ll make sure they know.
We’ll tell our brands to send you traffic
Every time a new retailer joins our network of data-sharing partners, we make sure our brands know. Every PriceSpider customer that is relevant to your business will receive an announcement regarding your participation in our retailer network, and their CSM will reach out to inform the brand stakeholders of the partnership directly.
Our customers include brands like P&G, Samsung, Sony, LG, General Mills, Conagra, Nestle, and GE, and they want to work with retailers that value relationships with brands and provide this crucial visibility. Partnering with us could be a valuable step toward making your catalog even more competitive and compelling—in addition to netting you more web traffic.
You won’t just get more traffic, either.
Brands can learn which traffic is best to send you
Having low conversion rates isn’t always an indicator of something wrong with your product page, your site, or the customer experience you provide. Sometimes, it simply means you didn’t have the right audience—it wasn’t high-intent traffic.
That’s why when brands use PriceSpider’s Where to Buy, they don’t just make decisions based on general conversion rates. Our technology enables brands to isolate individual assets, campaigns, and audiences. So, retailers can uncover which brands’ traffic is performing well—or if there are areas for improvement needed between all parties.
Say a brand has a campaign they promote via email, ads on various social platforms, blog posts, influencer content, and direct mailing. Using Where to Buy, they can see what percentage of each audience selects each retailer, and how well that traffic converts.
As they include you in more campaigns using Where to Buy, they may learn that their email audience is most likely to convert on your site, leading them to prioritize your placement in email campaigns moving forward. Or they might discover that your audience on Facebook converts more effectively at your store than on Instagram—or vice versa.
Over time, your brands can optimize their campaigns and send you the traffic most likely to convert on your site. Sharing this data creates a win-win scenario. When your brands do better, so do you.
It improves your relationships with brands
At times, brands and retailers can feel more like competitors than partners. But ultimately, you’re both trying to serve your shared customers as best as you can. And you both want your businesses to be as successful as possible. In order for everyone to benefit in the least expensive, most effective way, you have to work together.
Becoming a data-sharing partner with PriceSpider improves your brand relationships by empowering you to work together more effectively.
You can improve the customer experience together
As a data-sharing partner, you’ll automatically equip your brands to optimize their product pages and marketing based on actual performance—not assumptions. Your brands can see if their audiences actually buy the products they show them. If they’re not converting or they’re buying a competing product or something completely different, that’s an indicator that there’s a better way for your brands to serve your customers.
One of our favorite examples of how data-sharing empowers brands to improve a retailer’s customer experience is from Netgear. Through in-cart data, they learned that when customers clicked through to retailers, they frequently bought Netgear’s security cameras with baby products. Netgear rightfully took this as a sign that these customers were using their cameras as baby monitors, and they developed a completely new product—their own line of baby monitors was born.
You and your brands may find new ways to bundle products, new accessories your customers need, or better ways to talk about products to ensure they meet your customers’ needs.
Since you’ll be able to trace conversions back to specific assets and campaigns, you’ll also be able to test how direct-to-cart marketing performs compared to sending customers to a product page. Do consumers convert better when your brands send them straight to checkout on your site, or will that be too disruptive to the customer journey?
You can identify and troubleshoot problems
Any time there’s a problem with conversion rates, that’s something you and your brands should work together to solve—the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll both start seeing more sales. By becoming a data-sharing partner with PriceSpider, you’re not the only party with visibility into impressions and conversion rates. And if there’s a sudden drop, your brands will be highly motivated to find out what happened and how to fix the problem.
In the past, sudden drops in conversion rates have led retailers to discover unintended consequences of other decisions. For example, changing your ecommerce platform could invalidate traffic from Where to Buy—meaning brands send their customers to broken links instead of your product pages. It’s easy to fix once everyone is aware of what’s happening, but if you don’t share data through PriceSpider, it takes a lot longer to identify the issue.
We’ll send you reports you can’t get elsewhere
Being a data-sharing partner doesn’t require you to do any ongoing work. But we can send you reports to use as you like, showing you how much traffic brands are sending you (and where it’s coming from), how many transactions are occurring as a result of this traffic, and perhaps most importantly, which SKUs are generating the traffic that converts.
These reports show which brands are investing the most in their relationship with you and which products are “getting people in the door.” Even some of the largest retailers in the world didn’t have access to this data before partnering with PriceSpider. Our proprietary crawling technology closes this gap between you and your brands in ways that benefit you both. With this data, you’ll be equipped to make better-informed decisions about digital merchandising, promotions, and more.
And it all happens without giving up your rights to your data.
You can share data without giving up control
We’re not a media agency. Our only interest in your data is showing brands what happens to the traffic they send you. So that’s all they’ll see. Our Data Feed License Agreement outlines the data privacy terms and agreements between you and PriceSpider. We also don’t collect or store any personally identifiable information, and we fully comply with GDPR and other consumer protections. It’s your data, and you retain full rights to it.
Your competitors are already doing it
If you aren’t already a data-sharing partner with PriceSpider, you’re sacrificing market share to your competitors. They’re competing for the best conversion rates on our Where to Buy algorithms and giving brands the visibility they need to evaluate the performance of their campaigns. They’re troubleshooting with brands to quickly identify and resolve conversion- and traffic-related issues. And you don’t have a seat at the table yet. Even brands that highly value their relationship with you may struggle to justify sending you traffic that they could actually evaluate if they sent it to your competitor.
Partnering with PriceSpider enables you to prove how good you are at selling your brands’ products and empowers your brands to create the best possible customer experience on your site.
So what are you waiting for?
Become a direct data-sharing partner with PriceSpider
Partnering with PriceSpider is easy. You retain full rights to your data and control over how it’s used—we just need permission to share a certain segment of data with our brands that are sending you traffic through our WTB only. Your data doesn’t leave our platform. No retailer will ever have visibility into your performance, and only the brands sending you traffic will receive insights into how their traffic performs.
Once we’ve established a partnership agreement, we’ll make a test purchase to ensure tracking works, and then we’ll announce the partnership to our brands.
Ready to start a conversation about joining our network?
