Digital shelf software solutions
As the digital shelf encompasses every single touchpoint, impression and brand message your business provides for the customer, it’s crucial to analyse just how effective it is in satisfying their needs. There’s a range of digital shelf software options on the market to do just that – these digital shelf solutions monitor content on brand or retailer sites and provide actionable analytics intelligence on your digital shelf performance. The majority of them are usable for large enterprises, mid-size businesses and small business owners.
There are three main areas of attention where a digital shelf analytics solution should add value:
Product Content Quality
Provide insight into by offering real time information on the visibility, completeness, accuracy and competitiveness of product listings
Customer Behaviour
Show whether products are over performing or underperforming and how you can take advantage of the former and correct the latter
Channel competitiveness and performance
Highlight how well you measure up to competitors at a product category level
Core functionalities you should expect to be able to use include:
- Extensive reporting & statistics
- Ease of use
- Monitoring of backlinks
- Dashboard-type data visualisation
- Tracking of keyword ranking
- Actionable data in (near) real time
- SEO management
Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) should provide valuable information as much for B2B as for B2C, given the convergence of the two archetypal buyer profiles in an omnichannel digital ecosystem.
What kind of platform is digital analytics software?
Basically, there are two types.
1. Stand-alone system
If all you want to know is how your products are performing online, a stand-alone digital shelf software may be sufficient. They are very good for an in-depth level of performance monitoring, but don’t offer the ‘closed loop’ functionality which online merchants really need. Closed loop refers to a system which a starting ‘set’ point but which can then make adjustments automatically, without needing input from a user.
2. Integrated digital shelf analytics solution
You may want (or need) more than just analytics in isolation. Nowadays, many product information management solutions (PIM) have digital shelf analytics built into its range of features. This is the advantage of the closed loop feedback – if the issue lies with the quality of product information (content customers see) – and very frequently, it does – the PIM system can act immediately on the data intelligence it receives to make the necessary changes to optimise the problem area.
Download our guide for How to win on the Digital Shelf
Software vendors
There are several stand-alone analytics packages on the market, but in recent times, PIM solution providers have started bundling DSA software as an integrated feature. We’ve selected a representative group of solutions in both categories – stand-alone and integrated.
Stand-alone options
Brandquad
Brandquad is a global product experience management platform (PXM) for retailers, brands, and manufacturers. Its main purpose is to optimise the customers’ experience.
The Brandquad Digital Shelf Analytics solution generates actionable insights by monitoring product content and pricing on sales channels, the aim being to optimise performance, increase conversion rates, and reduce time to market.
The product data management component drives cost reductions by reducing the risk of manual processing errors, freeing up internal teams to act on e-shelf monitoring insights.
So Brandquad’s all-inclusive platform offers other complementary solutions in industries as diverse as Health & Beauty, FMCG, Pharma and Building Materials.
Profitero
Profitero aims to accelerate commerce by offering brands a set of flexible solutions. These include comprehensive insights and support for eCommerce brands to make informed decisions about their digital shelf strategy. They operate across 950+ retailers in more than 50 countries, providing:
integrated predictive analytics – actionable recommendations through in-depth analysis order to optimise product pricing, performance and positioning across the digital shelf.
advisory services so brands can optimise availability, discoverability, and conversion
Activation services, for businesses to obtain tailored media and content results faster
These three features allow businesses to validate decisions, quantify opportunities and drive sales using highly accurate 1P & 3P competitor sales & market share insights.
Customer business case outcomes include:
- Optimisation of Amazon portfolios & product content
- Use of Profitero scorecards to boost growth in different territories,
- Minimisation of out-of-stocks for single products and optimising use of marketplace ads
Edge (by Ascential)
Edge focuses primarily on retailing and provides tools for optimisation across five main KPIs:
- Content accuracy
- Availability and assortment
- Share of search
- Price and promotions
- Reviews and ratings
Specific functionalities with the KPIs
Availability and assortment: optimisation of product availability, highlights unavailable items, identifies persistent availability issues. analyses assortment and pricing at market and store level to identify location-specific problems and opportunities.
Share of search: benchmarks performance against competitors’, identifies undiscoverable SKUs for remediation, optimises search strategies across retailer channels
Content accuracy: identifies SKUs displaying non-compliant text or images, compares content from Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to your PDP standards, keyword-optimises product titles and descriptions to boost search rankings
Ratings and reviews: crawls ratuing to identify underperforming SKUs, benchmarks performance with that of competitors, leverages user-generated keywords to optimise content and boost conversions
Price and promotions: monitors pricing across channels, checks compliance for all promotions, extracts competitive intelligence to bolster brand equity
Product performance platforms
We should mention product Performance platforms such as ROI Hunter. These platforms take campaign data which can be added to Digital Shelf Analytics and Returns data to obtain a more comprehensive picture of product performance.
Download our guide for How to win on the Digital Shelf
PIM vendors with DSA as an integrated part of their Product Experience (PX) platforms
Salsify
Salsify helps brand manufacturers to deliver an optimal, omnichannel product experience through their product experience management platform (PXM). This combines a PIM solution and DAM capability, the industry’s broadest commerce ecosystem, and applicable insights to create engaging product experiences across every digital touchpoint.
The Salsify Automated Insights is a paid for add-on which offers closed-loop product page analytics to allow brands to measure the impact of the product information they are syndicating to their digital shelf.
Validating data quality enables users to cross-reference and track content in real time against the product data ‘golden record’ in its PIM, to ensure accuracy on product pages.
Compliance reporting sends alerts on discrepancies, so errors can be addressed quickly.
Measures search ranking from specified keywords to identify those which drive the highest search rank, as well as offering insight into those unused keywords which might increase visibility.
Product content analysis against metrics which drive conversions, so as to make informed decisions based on hard data (not guesswork) to sustain success on the digital shelf.
Product page grades reporting scores product content based on conversion metrics to get actionable insights into the content which needs optimising to increase customer engagement
Inriver
Inriver Channel Insights uses automation for ongoing channel-monitoring on the digital shelf. It delivers real-time insight into
- shopper behaviour
- product content performance
- competition across channels.
With this closed-loop feedback, sers can respond fast to product listings issues such as missing images or incorrect text. guarantees that product detail pages are up to date and fully optimised for customers, brand equity, and all channels.
The Inriver digital shelf analytics features are accessible direct from the main dashboard to ease identification of category-level data on how chosen products (including competitors’) are performing on digital selves. Users can then refine and adapt their content, marketing, and syndication strategies
Above is a representative sample set of digital shelf analytics providers. As you see, they all have similar ranges of features, and provide demos. What’s better for you? That’s a question of speaking to Start with Data to tap into our expertise in digital shelf. Contact us and we’ll be happy to have a more in-depth conversation about your digital shelf software best suits your specific circumstances and requirements.