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July 25, 2007 |
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Analytics: A Must When Using Shopping Destination Sites
by Chip Arndt
 Miami, FL (July 25, 2007)—MerchantAdvantage is a firm believer that online merchants must have excellent analysis of how shopping destination sites are performing for them on an ongoing basis. Many shopping destination sites provide performance data on how "their" shopping destination site performs for each client; however, the issue that still remains for online merchants is having the ability to analyze and compare how marketing campaigns are performing across all shopping destination sites in one place.
It is essential to analyze, on a daily basis, how product categories, sub-categories and individual SKUs are performing across all the marketing channels and within each channel. This newsletter covers marketing channel analytics, its implementation, and practical uses therein to help grow online sales and increase return on investment (“ROI”).
Definition of Marketing Channel Analytics
MerchantAdvantage offers a specialized and comprehensive analytic tool when using shopping destination sites. Our Channel Management Professional and Lite products include this tool to monitor if marketing campaigns are cost-effective when using shopping comparison sites. That tool is called “Chanalytics” and helps online merchants assess the effectiveness of marketing channel campaigns.
Shopping destination sites include: marketplaces, such as Amazon and Underbid, affiliate marketing sites, such as Commission Junction and Linkshare, and over 100 comparison shopping engines, such as Become.com, GolfPricer.com, Jellyfish.com, Like.com, PriceForSure.com, PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Smarter.com, Yahoo! Shopping, etc…. For a more complete list of shopping comparison sites that MerchantAdvantage works with, please see http://www.merchantadvantage.com
Many shopping destination sites provide analytic reports to their online merchant clients; and these reports are useful to analyzing how that individual shopping destination site is performing. But, MerchantAdvantage recommends using an analytic tool that allows the online merchant to analyze how all of their marketing feeds are performing in order to compare the performance of each shopping destination feed against the other to increase an online merchant’s overall level of understanding.
Other Analytic Essentials (an aside)
MerchantAdvantage reminds online merchants that analytics in general are critical to use when monitoring how your web storefront, “adword/keyword” campaigns, email campaigns, and other online marketing campaigns are performing. Therefore, we are more than happy to recommend excellent companies that can help you in these areas not covered by MerchantAdvantage. In some cases, our analytic tool interfaces directly with these other companies to ensure that you can analyze marketing performance measures all in one place.
If you are new to the concept of analytics, as a first step, we encourage online merchants to assess how Google Analytics can work for them to monitor how their web storefront is performing, and it is FREE. From there, you will be more than prepared and open to understand how other companies, with analytic tools, can help you manage all areas of your online business including the use of shopping destination sites.
Using Marketing Channel Analytics for Shopping Destination Sites
Setting up:
- Directly with the shopping destination site:
When you set up a marketing feed to a shopping destination site, many of them provide you with a reporting feature to analyze how your marketing feed is performing. To take advantage of this feature, simply open up an account with the shopping destination site, start feeding your data, and then ask if they have a reporting feature. If the shopping destination site has this feature, they will provide you an analysis of how your feed is performing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Special Note:
Each shopping destination site’s reporting feature will be unique, so integrating the reports into one place to analyze how all of your feeds are performing across categories and SKUs may be cumbersome. Google Analytics offers a feature that may be able to track this general performance, but check with them to ensure that you set it up correctly and update it, so you get accurate results. You may also want to ask about the level of detail you get with their analytic feature; general data can be useful but more detailed information is desired.
- Using a tool based solution as Chanalytics(sm) by MerchantAdvantage:
When you set up a marketing feed to a shopping destination site using a tool based solution you should only have to click a button to see how those marketing feeds are performing. Simply set up your account with each shopping destination site, start feeding your product catalog data through your feed management tool and activate the analytic tool in the application.
Special Note:
a. If the data feed tool you are using does not have an easy to use built in analytic function, ask why and consider using a feed management tool that does have one, and
b. You should still receive reports directly from each shopping destination site which you can use to compare to your inbuilt analytic reports to cross-check for accuracy.
Analyzing Results:
Regardless of how you set up your analytic process, it is essential to understand what the results of analytic reports mean to increase your ROI. These results should be presented in the form of basic bar and pie chart reports and also more sophisticated crystal and excel reports – for ongoing internal reporting.
Each report should allow management to drill down to obtain specific information on sales and ROI at the category, sub-category and individual SKU level as well as view general, macro trends. Here are some examples of what your analytic reports should be telling you in one place about your marketing channel feeds for one storefront or multiple storefronts:
- Individual shopping destination site marketing/sales performance:
a. Category performance
b. Sub-category’ performance
c. Product sold/clicked on
d. Product price
e. Product cost
f. Sales
g. Clicks
h. Click Cost
i. Net Profit
j. Click-to-sales ratio
k. Click-through ratio to your site
l. Sales in relation to set up costs and marketing budgets
m. Click-to-sales on actual product clicked on
n. Click-to-sales on related products from original click
o. Click-to-leads on related products from original click
- Channel performance across multiple shopping destination sites:
a. Highest click-to-sales ratio
i. By category
ii. By individual SKU
iii. By whatever each merchant feels is relevant
Acting on Results:
Now that you have this information, what do you do with it? The objectives for each company are often unique, so instead of going into all that you can do with this information we instead present a simple case study of how one of our clients used their marketing channel analytics to sell a certain product quickly, increase ROI, and create a new online marketing campaign strategy.
Sample Case Study – Company A:
Issue:
Liquidate existing inventory of a specific product quickly to make room for a new shipment of inventory.
Marketing Strategy:
Analyze which marketing/shopping destination channels sell the product the best and then discount that product across all marketing channels experimenting with various discounts (10% off, 15% off, 20% off, 25% off).
Solution:
Company A first analyzed where the product was selling well and not selling well. They analyzed if consumers were just clicking on a product or actually buying the product after clicking on it. This information was important because the company could then:
- A. Decide weather or not to pull that particular product from a specific shopping destination site and stop marketing it into the future or
- B. Continue to market that product on shopping destination sites where the product was selling and then discount it in order to move more product to accommodate the new inventory
The company executed both A. and B.
First, they removed the individual product SKU from shopping destination site feeds that were not selling the product at all, keeping the rest of the feed in place. This action resulted in increased ROI for those sites. Second, they discounted the product on the shopping destination sites that were selling the product well.
The company took part B. one step further by experimenting with different discounts across each shopping destination site to see which discount worked best. (this typically requires additional programming on the part of the storefront) This approach allowed the company to move product more quickly, at the lowest possible discount, while retaining the highest possible sales margin on each sale. They were able to experiment with these discounts across several shopping destination sites immediately by using their Channel Management with Chanalytics application to update prices, add marketing language/discounts, and pull non-performing products with a click of a button.
Ongoing Use:
Marketing channel analytics are critical in order to garner the highest ROI from your shopping destination feeds. Marketing your product catalog using shopping destination sites without a robust back-end analytic tool to assess how these marketing channels are performing is not prudent and leads to improper marketing channel campaigns. To make the most of the power and extensive reach of shopping destination sites, to millions of potential new customers, management should use analytics on a daily basis to:
- Assess whether or not the costs associated with marketing their product catalog using shopping destination sites are prudent expenditures, even if these marketing campaigns primarily lead to click-throughs to your online storefront and not immediate sales
- Implement successful marketing campaigns on one shopping destination site across other shopping destination sites
- React to non-performing marketing campaigns, and
- Experiment and test the performance of other shopping destination sites.
MerchantAdvantage Wrap Up:
Shopping Destination Sites offer the opportunity to market your online storefront and product catalog to millions of new customers. When marketed into correctly, these sites can lead to new sales and brand awareness. The issue with most online, marketing campaigns using shopping destination sites is that online merchants do not assess how there marketing campaigns are performing and often blame the shopping destination sites for poor click-to-sales ratio performance. Robust analytic reports are critical to measuring the success of these marketing campaigns and empower management to react in real time.
Analytic reports should monitor and measure several critical performance indicators, on a daily basis, of each marketing campaign within a shopping destination site and across all shopping destination sites. Only with this analysis can management and marketing managers make prudent decisions on how to increase the performance of their marketing campaigns using shopping destination sites, increase their ROI, and experiment with new marketing strategies within these marketing channels. |
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Analytics and Chanalytics(sm)
by Scott Chen, Tech Support
 Miami, FL (July 25, 2007)—Chanalytics(sm) is a powerful tool which will help you understand how your advertised products through Channel Management are performing. If used properly, it will help you gain profit and reduce cost.
We have dedicated a lot of time on Chanalytics(sm) making it user friendly and data rich. Although it is not an accounting software; if set up properly, it will give you valuable information about your products, the market and how your customer thinks therefore give you an edge over your competitors.
You can get Chanalytics(sm) to work with just a few requirements; inserting java script in your product pages and confirmation page. But to get a good comprehensive report, utilize all available variables such as product cost and click cost. Take full advantage of chanalytics, import your cost into the database for profit calculations, insert order ID and order total so you can validate and get a more accurate report.
Once you get a good idea of how your products are performing pertinent to each channel, you can adjust your feeds to optimize your ROI.
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Merchant of the Month: Soholighting.com
 I am really excited to be up and running on the MerchantAdvantage application Channel Management. We were about to outsource our channel management and data entry work to a firm in India for a couple of thousand dollars a month when MerchantAdvantage came along.
This application has saved us tons of time and money and our data feed is more accurate. We have also begun listing with many other channels where we expect to see an uptick in sales. The program is extremely robust and has so far exceeded my expectations in terms of it's capacity to manipulate and handle my data.
The training sessions were very organized and professional and I have found all MerchantAdvantage staff to be helpful and knowledgeable. The program is intuitive and easy to use though that it might just feel that way because of the tremendous training and follow support from Brett.
Thank you to the entire MerchantAdvantage team - especially Brett for your great service, training and follow up.
Get Your Channel Management Fee Waived Plus Receive a Complimentary Companion Airline Ticket!
We're thrilled and inspired by all the Channel Management success stories you share with us. Now we want to turn the spotlight on you! Send us your best Channel Management success story and you could be selected as our Merchant of the Month.
If chosen, your company will be exclusively showcased in an edition of our monthly newsletter, eTail dTail. Best of all, your monthly MerchantAdvantage fee will be waived in the month you are selected and you will receive a complimentary Companion Airline Ticket. Submit your Channel Management success story today to stories@merchantadvantage.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
(Note: MerchantAdvantage reserves the right to use any or all of your story, whether or not your article is selected as the winning entry.) |
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About MerchantAdvantage
MerchantAdvantage (www.MerchantaAdvantage.com) is an ecommerce software solutions company committed to championing and helping the small to midsized online ecommerce Merchant address complicated online issues and take a systematic, controlled and proactive approach to online product marketing. MerchantAdvantage provides long-term, cost effective software tools that enable an online business to grow by reaching the widest audience possible via online, broadband, and wireless devices. MerchantAdvantage’s applications are designed to thoroughly connect the online retailer to their marketplace partners in a seamless motion of communication allowing Merchants to take control of their ecommerce channels, marketing strategies, and IT solutions. These software tools specifically help ecommerce retailers bridge the gap created by non-standardized data feeds to various online market places, shopping comparison sites, and other online shopping destination sites.
MerchantAdvantage is changing the macrocosm of ecommerce by staying ahead of the curve in providing business solutions to the growing online retail marketplace: We’re here because America’s commerce future is online.
MerchantAdvantage, the premier software for on-line retailers looking for an efficient and cost-effective method to online product marketing introduces Channel Management with Chanalytics(sm) Professional and Lite. Channel Management products help online retailers save time and money while maximizing their return on investment and marketing budgets by allowing them to easily connect to shopping comparison sites an assess their performance. MerchantAdvantage is for online retailers wishing to better manage online marketing efforts and increase sales volume.
MerchantAdvantage – Take Control of Your Marketing Channels!
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Email us at:
tip@etaildtail.com
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• Facebook, Bebo et al boost
online retail by directtraffic.org
Social networks and other online community activities are driving more and more people to make purchases over the internet, a new study indicates.
Research by JC Williams Group and sponsored by Visa and Yahoo Canada found that more online buyers use networking tools to share opinions and insights than those who tend to buy offline.
When the rapid rise of websites such as Bebo, Facebook and Flickr is considered, this is good news for online advertisers - more shared experiences mean that more people will buy their goods.
Compared to those web users who do not shop online, web buyers in the study were more than twice as likely to have written a product review and twice as likely to have posted video content to the internet
"Consumers are increasingly turning to their online community or network for advice instead of traditional mass media," said JC Williams Group's Jim Okamura.
"It is indicative of the shift to an empowered consumer and the rapid fragmentation of media channels. It definitely presents a challenge for online marketers."
Yahoo's Hunter Madsen pointed out that marketers are likely to find some of their most responsive shoppers at social networking sites.
• TheFind.com Finds $15M
by redherring.com
Shopping search startup TheFind.com has landed a $15 million series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Also participating were existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The Mountain View, California-based company claims its search results are neutral because it does not charge merchants to display their products. In contrast, shopping sites such as E.W. Scripps’ Shopzilla, eBay’s Shopping.com, Become.com and Nextag feature results that are paid for by advertisers, often without telling shoppers the listing is sponsored.
Like Google’s search engine, TheFind.com independently crawls merchant sites and searches for the most relevant products for shoppers. It also relies on algorithms to analyze and rank the most popular products from more than 500,000 stores.
“The rough analogy is looking at every store to see what’s on the shelves,” said CEO Siva Kumar. “That gives us a big picture of supply. Then we look at users—what they search for, what they click—as a measure of demand. Then we match demand and supply to measure what’s the best selling product, brand, or style.” - ADVERTISEMENT - TheFind.com is one a group of Web 2.0 shopping sites—including Become.com, Mpire, Ugenie—that are hoping to revisit the success of older comparison shopping sites such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com, which were both acquired in 2005.
While TheFind.com does not accept payments to list search results, the site sells banner ads and sponsored listings that are clearly marked.
Mr. Kumar compared TheFind.com to Google’s AdWords, which ranks search ads based on which are most relevant and get the most clicks. He compared competitors to Yahoo’s old search engine, which ranked results based strictly on how much each advertiser as willing to pay for exposure.
TheFind.com, launched in October 2006, will use its cash infusion to hire its own sales force, build its product and develop more partnerships. In June, TheFind partnered with PayPal to launch a site strictly for Paypal merchants.
TheFind.com originally tested out its product as the ticket-selling site FatLens.com.
In April, Google rebranded its Froogle shopping search as Google Product Search. The search giant is pushing this redesigned shopping search along with online payment system Google Checkout and classified listing service Google Base.
TheFind is keeping an eye on Google's Product Search, said Scott Friend of Bain Capital Ventures, who led Bain’s investment in TheFind.
"We are paying close attention to [Google]," Mr. Friend said. "It's the only other site that does the crawling aspect reasonably well. But they do not do the browsing as well. The pictures are very small. It hasn’t been clear that Google has made it a priority... That’s good for TheFind."
• eBay Watch: Groups, Google Checkout and iPhones Galore
by ecommerce-guide.com
In eBay site news, near the end of June Rachel Makool, senior director of Community Development announced some changes planned for eBay Groups. Some of those changes included a facelift of the Groups page, more personalization and design options, communication through e-mail and Skype, enhanced search, and more.
In other new releases, eBay's Buyer Experience team has announced new "eBay Toolbar Featuring Yahoo!," which is designed to offer an improved search for eBay, Half.com and Yahoo. The new toolbar also provides account guard, eBay alerts for bidding and selling activity, and additional bug fixes and updates that address issues from previous releases.
In company news this week, eBay has officially launched the U.S. version of its online classifieds network, Kijiji, which is available in more than 200 U.S. cities. What makes the launch of the U.S. version of Kijiji interesting is that it's a direct competitor with Craigslist, of which eBay owns a 25 percent share.
Read Full Article >>
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"MerchantAdvantage is here to be your partner in growing your business in the multi billion dollar and complex world of online shopping. We are here because you are online.sm"
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Michael Lambert, CEO |
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For information on how MerchantAdvantage may help your business grow, please contact us:
Chip Arndt
Executive Vice President
Business Development and Strategy
305.895.9466 x113
partnerships@merchantadvantage.com
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