ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics is the latest addition to ChannelAdvisor’s platform for multichannel e-commerce brands. Brands use Brand Analytics to capture and process millions of e-commerce data points, ultimately driving better online retail and marketplace execution, growing sales and protecting their brand image.
Many ChannelAdvisor customers have already implemented Brand Analytics and leveraged its multiple synergies with the rest of our product lines. Here are eight ways your brand could benefit from Brand Analytics.
1. Optimize your wholesale channels
If your distribution strategy includes wholesale channels, Brand Analytics is perfect for you. While many of these first-party (or 1P) relationships with retail channels typically involve less brand oversight, Brand Analytics puts you back in control. You can monitor stock issues, pricing changes, search performance, content and other critical areas by processing millions of data points in real time. These metrics can provide insight into why some retailers perform well, why some don’t and where you should take action.
2. Scout new channels to plan your product launches
If you’re using ChannelAdvisor to connect to marketplace and drop-ship channels, the question is often the same: Where to next? But how can you determine which channels, both locally and globally, are the best fit for your business?
You can use the Search Performance functionality to scout new channels within the Brand Analytics interface. Find out which brands sell there already and identify key success factors to adjust your launch roadmap and fine-tune your go-to-market strategy.
3. Get more out of your retail media campaigns
Retail media is great for driving sales on retail sites and marketplaces. But it’s also easy to miss low-hanging fruit or to waste money in suboptimal campaigns.
You can also use Brand Analytics to power advanced keyword research. Identify competitor gaps and keywords where no one is advertising. See where on the page your ads appeared. Check which competitors are advertising on your brand terms. Save on campaigns by excluding products that work well organically. And suppress campaigns when products are out of stock or have limited options.
More generally, you usually want to avoid pouring media spend into retailers that aren’t aligned with your goals regarding availability, price points, reviews and content. The Brand Analytics Executive Scorecard lets your team communicate around key retailer performance metrics — and make ad spend decisions accordingly.
4. Drive better execution on your 1P (drop-ship) and third-party (3P) channels
Brand Analytics complements your selling efforts on most marketplaces. You can track delisted products, content changes, share of search and more. While ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces handles the input, having additional metrics to monitor your performance only increases your effectiveness on those channels.
5. Nurture retailer relationships
ChannelAdvisor Shoppable Media helps you make more digital touchpoints shoppable and lead interested shoppers to checkout. And by creating a more streamlined purchase experience, you’re funneling more sales to retail partners. While Shoppable Media lets you prioritize retailers based on factors like availability or price, some brands take it further by adding Brand Analytics.
Brand Analytics can capture and grade the quality of retailer product content. You can then feed this information back into your Shoppable Media campaigns. This ensures that you only send traffic to the best-converting pages! And it also incentivizes your retailers to implement your content as best as possible.
6. Strategically boost sales velocity to increase searchability
Every retailer uses a different algorithm to rank products in on-site search results. As a brand, you usually want to maximize your position there. However, as most retailers use sales velocity to rank products, climbing to the top isn’t easy.
ChannelAdvisor Shoppable Media lets you strategically drive traffic to your retailers. By using Brand Analytics, you can determine which pages would benefit from a nudge. Set them as the target for your Shoppable Media campaigns, and then track the impact in Brand Analytics.
7. Protect your brand across all your touchpoints
In a multichannel environment, customers are bound to interact with your brand over several channels. A recent ChannelAdvisor study showed that 82% of global customers visit at least two sites before purchasing a product. How can you ensure consistency between channels? Sure, your team controls the brand’s website and social media. But if your brand sells on indirect channels, how does it control them?
Consistency is about making your brand easier to recognize and memorize. It’s about avoiding massive price differences for the same products.
On retail sites and drop-ship channels, your resellers implement your content and set their prices at their discretion. On marketplaces, third-party sellers could list your products, change your content and set prices you don’t endorse.
Brand Analytics monitors your product content, reviews, and prices across all sales channels. You can get a centralized view of your brand no matter who manages each.
8. When selling hybrid, keep 1P and 3P prices aligned
As global economic predictions grow more pessimistic, many retailers strive to reduce their exposure to risk by listing fewer SKUs. This especially applies to brands with many variations like colors or sizes. If your brand is affected and some retailers decide only to carry a few of your variations, you may want to start offering the other variations as a 3P seller on the same platform.
But there’s always a risk that retailers could decide to change the price of the 1P variations, and you would be left with inconsistent prices just because of a difference in size and colors, which reflects poorly on your brand. One solution is to use Brand Analytics to track your products’ prices on 1P channels and then feed that information to our marketplaces module to update your 3P prices via our API.
Brands need deep access to information about their e-commerce channels to succeed online. ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics is designed to be the central hub for a brand’s multichannel data, adding value to other ChannelAdvisor capabilities to provide deep insights into brand health and performance.
