In this B&T exclusive, Resolution Digital’s Gavin McColl explores how brands can properly measure their performance across various retailers, and the Australian-first eCommerce Retail Tracking tool, to help clients clearly see their products share of shelf, and keyword performance online.
eCommerce growth in Australia shows no sign of abating. The latest AusPost 2022 Inside Australian Online Shopping industry report showed that eCommerce accounts for 19.3% of all retail spend, growing at 12.3% YoY, and proving that COVID is no longer the driving force behind eCommerce acceleration.
For brands selling products across multiple retailers, the ability to accurately quantify your share of shelf and performance can prove an ongoing challenge.
Retailers typically do not share a wealth of data to brands, making strategic thinking and understanding where to dedicate resource difficult.
Sales data provided by retailers is one such metric to utilise but doesn’t give the full picture as there is zero competitive context to how much share of shelf you are occupying. This is why Resolution Digital has developed an Australian-first with its eCommerce Retail Tracking tool, built in the proprietary platform Flightdeck.
Key Data Points
Generally speaking, your product’s place within online retail category navigation will be dictated by promotional activity, or margin products and best sellers that are likely to gain the retailer greater returns.
On-site search is typically driven by product detail – in other words – how best your product information resonates with a user’s search terms. With some strategic focus on how a brand’s product is visually merchandised online, brands can drive incremental online sales. Considering 70% of clicks on Woolworths.com.au are generated by listings in the top positions this demonstrates the importance of ranking highly to drive sales growth.
This is where Resolution Digital’s eCommerce Retail Tracking comes into play.
Keyword Rank Tracking
Resolution Digital has built the capability to track a brand’s products, and competitor rankings, for any given search term on your key retailers.
In the example above, we would be able to tell SunRice that they are ranking 2nd for the search term “rice”. This product would be considered 2nd because Woolworths’ product is occupying the first spot and the second tile is a marketing/promotional banner for Mother’s Day, with the third tile for Continental Cheesy Rice being a ‘sponsored’ placement (in other words, the Continental is using Retail media budgets to pay for their product to feature).
So, organically speaking, the first two ranking products (organic) are the Woolworths White Rice and the Sunrice White Rice.
Resolution Digital’s eCommerce tracking tool can show how many products are ranking and in what position for any given search term. This data will then be built into customised dashboards to help visualise performance for the most important product terms.
Table 1.0 provides an example of current eCommerce retail tracking set up for a Resolution Digital client. This helps capture a clear understanding of ranking performance and any improvements using the tool’s TransAct focus. In the example above we can see our client ranking 1stposition for ‘multi surface cleaner’ and saw strong growth for ‘multipurpose cleaners’, growing from 25th position to 18th.
When you then factor in the ability to track your competitors rankings too, you can develop a clear ‘share of shelf’ view that can feed into broader strategies.
Resolution Digital can track keyword performance across more than 30 retailers in Australia, across 6 key verticals: Grocery, Liquor, Marketplaces, Fashion, Consumer Electronics and Petfood.
Fleshing out the data
In addition to share of shelf, clickstream data allows us to overlay core performance metrics such as traffic, pages per session, average session duration and bounce rate. It also has a timeline of product optimisation activity, which in turn allows brands to report on effectiveness of their Retail optimisation.
This also serves as a fantastic benchmark to measure performance when investing resource into improving a brand’s performance across your key retailers.
The Big Picture
By utilising this data, with ranking performance, overlayed with the available sales data, brands will be able to give the clearest picture of performance, share of shelf, gaps, and opportunities.
