The world of CPG and e-commerce has been changing fast—and the wild ride doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. The rise of e-commerce has turned many brick-and-mortar shoppers into online and omnichannel shoppers. And they’re rapidly moving between channels, influenced by availability, good deals, and convenience.
As a result, shopping trends can change fast—and brands are under pressure to adapt. This is challenging under any circumstances, but especially in a market as dynamic as it is today. It’s more important than ever to have access to business intelligence that can help you make better decisions for your brand and products. This is where turning to a robust performance analytics platform like Line Item can enable powerful monitoring and optimization of e-analytics data for greater visibility, profitability, and competitive edge.
As you’re considering e-analytics platforms and options, it’s important to evaluate the frequency and cadence of the data offered by the solutions you’re considering. This is because data velocity is key in helping you home in on actionable insights in a fast-paced market.
In most cases, platforms offer either daily or weekly updated data.
- Daily data is reported and updated at a set time each day. This means the most recent day’s information is added to the dataset, giving you updated insight as well as any corrections or adjustments to previous days’ data.
- Weekly data is typically updated on the same day of the week each week. It gives you an aggregated overview of every data point, but it doesn’t isolate specific individual days.
The frequency and cadence of the data are going to influence your e-commerce marketing strategy, and your ability to respond to these dynamic shifts we’re continuing to see in the market, so it’s crucial to understand the difference. Weekly data can help you understand and forecast general sales trends over time as well as focus on consumer behavior trends like popular keyword searches.
Weekly data, though, can hamper your ability to respond to market shifts and changes in consumer behaviors with agility. This is where daily data can make a huge difference in business intelligence and responsiveness for brands. Daily data can enable you to respond to a range of scenarios that can make or break your brand. Here are a few to consider.
Speed reaction time. Daily data can accelerate your ability to respond to things that can have an adverse effect on sales, like out-of-stocks, third-party activity, and MAP violations. This is where daily insight from Line Item can help you monitor out-of-stocks and determine if they’re hurting your revenue. Line Item also enables you to verify item pricing, analyze if your products are overpriced, or help you identify third-party activity that might be damaging your brand or its sales. With the potential cascade effect of retailers lowering prices across platforms, pricing violations can quickly hurt revenue—and waiting a week for insight could do serious damage to your bottom line.
Understand and react to customer sentiment. Imagine that your customers have microphones, and they’re able to broadcast bad news when they see it. This isn’t a stretch, as social media is the microphone, and customers are using it widely and freely. Add to this the reality that in a digital world, customers seek out reviews before purchasing, and you can see how a negative review can have a snowball effect on customer sentiment. In a fast-paced market, you won’t want to wait a week for damage control. Daily data can give you insight into reviews—and Line Item can help with visibility into reviews that might be holding your brand back, so you have the agility to course correct.
Track and parse trends. In such a rapidly changing market, trends can mean new opportunities for sales—and to grow brand and product loyalty with a persuadable market. But taking advantage of them requires timely insight into changes in shopper behavior, high-volume days and the effect on demand, and understanding what really drives value. Knowledge truly is power, and Line Item can help you have more of both. You can monitor new and unknown competitors, including foreign and low-priced, to understand potential threats to customers and market share. You can also drill down into product attributes to understand what customers are seeking, from flavors to form and packaging. This is especially critical as new variables come into play in our ever-changing present.
Access to more and better data is changing how e-commerce and CPG marketers respond to the market. It’s a competitive advantage your brand can’t afford to ignore. But choosing the right cadence and frequency of data enables agility and insight that can truly make the difference in sales and profitability. It’s important to understand the difference in data delivery between platforms and evaluate how access to daily data can help your brand better navigate today’s wild ride. This is where Line Item can truly be your lifeline to more profitable e-commerce.
