Today’s business environment is constantly changing. Consumer preferences and demands are shifting—sometimes daily. Even more, during the last year, consumers have become less loyal to brands and even the ways they traditionally shop.
This is not a time to guess at what’s right for your business. It’s a time to have access to robust data to monitor the competition, seize opportunities, ensure return on marketing spend—and drive better decision-making. This is the power of business intelligence (BI).
According to recent research, though, while businesses are starting to spend big on BI, adoption rates lag below 30%. This means that key decision-makers don’t have the data at their fingertips to make better decisions for their brands—and bottom lines.
The right e-commerce analytics tools give brands access to better insights faster, enabling them to be responsive, edge out the competition, and see where the market is going. In today’s exploding e-commerce market, which is predicted to grow nearly 200% between 2019 and 2022, brands can’t afford to think of BI as a “nice to have.” It’s an essential. But how do you choose which solution to invest in? Here’s our look at some of the e-commerce analytics tools and platforms on the market.
Good: Pacvue
What: an enterprise platform to manage ad campaigns at scale on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and other popular retail sites
Pacvue offers targeted solutions built for brands, sellers, and marketing agencies and separate solutions for each retail site. Its software is intended to improve campaign performance with automation, competitive intelligence, and streamlined reporting so that brands can grow their digital sales. It enables visibility into retail and advertising data wherever and whenever users need it.
Why Good? While powerful, Pacvue is only focused on ad campaign performance.
Better: ClearCut
What: a platform for e-commerce and data insights in a changing retail market
The ClearCut Insights Platform gives brands and e-commerce professionals visibility in e-commerce sales data and category trends. Users can benchmark competitors. ClearCut also enables real-time insights into brand or product performance on Amazon, including tracking 1P and 3P daily sales, search rankings, MAP violations and more.
Why Better? ClearCut provides a broader set of e-analytics capabilities for brands than Pacvue, but there are limitations. For instance, insight into sales is available only for Amazon, not other popular digital channels and e-tailers.
Better: Edge by Ascential
What: e-commerce solutions for global brands and retailers
Edge by Ascential is a suite of solutions designed to improve e-commerce insights and performances. There are separate solution sets, including Market Share, Digital Shelf, Price + Promo, Retail Insight, and more. Consider them separate modules that can be purchased and integrated to enable visibility into different aspects of e-commerce. Professional consultative services can also be contracted through the company.
Why Better? While Edge by Ascential provides a deep set of capabilities, unless you purchase all solutions, your broad visibility into your entire e-analytics portfolio is limited.
Better: Profitero
What: e-commerce platform
With daily analytics and benchmark data, Profitero provides digital shelf analytics to detect opportunities to improve sales performance across a wide range of retailer websites. There are sales and market share estimates for products and competitors. In addition, Profitero enables the ability to monitor out-of-stocks, boost search rankings, and optimize campaigns. Users can also access Profitero’s consulting experts.
Why Better? Profitero is certainly a powerful platform, but it’s intended for a broad range of brands, not purpose-built for CPG e-commerce.
Best: Line Item
What: Line Item is a performance analytics platform that gives consumer packaged goods (CPG) and e-commerce marketing managers insights into e-analytics and product attributes to drive revenue and profitability. Created for the CPG industry, it’s backed by a team with more than 30 years of experience in the CPG market. It’s a single tool to boost profitability and drive growth across your e-commerce portfolio with better business intelligence. Its deep insight into product attributes truly sets it apart.
With Line Item, brand and e-commerce professionals can optimize SEO and digital market strategy across all retail sites and platforms. They can see, track, and analyze search results and performance, again across all sites and down to long-tail keywords and particular campaigns. They can understand what’s working for their brands and products, as well as what’s holding them back—from incomplete descriptions or inconsistent images to competitor activity and MAP violations. They can monitor competitor activity, out-of-stocks, price undercuts and delivery time across all sales platforms and digital channels with a single tool. They can also understand product attributes across entire categories.
Why Best? It’s a single platform with comprehensive capabilities purpose-built for CPG e-commerce.
In a competitive and ever-changing CPG e-commerce market, Line Item is your lifeline to more profitable e-commerce.
