Successful retail has always been defined in-store by the last 6 feet, we wanted to extend this thinking online and ensure the last few clicks also delivered a frictionless shopping experience for online commerce.

We also knew from data supplied by one of the major grocery retailers in Australia, that product listing content drives discoverability in on-site search and in-turn that almost 50% of items ‘Added To Basket’ were from the top 3 search results. Similar to Google search results, almost all clicks on retailer search engine results pages were delivered by those results on the 1st page, with very few shoppers making it to page 2.

With e-commerce driving all meaningful growth for consumer goods brands, our strategy needed to deliver the maximum return from both the latent and media-driven demand by providing a frictionless shopping experience which drove both discoverability & conversion.

Focusing on top selling products, we developed an online crawler to scrape & extract the data for each SKU from its product page on each retailer. This automated process visited the product URL on every retailer, to capture, consolidate & track performance against the rules created under each element. Prior to establishing the solution, the only way to check these measures was by manually visiting each page. Even then, without the framework in mind, the task had the potential to be inconsistent and subjective.

Results were then aggregated and visualized into an easy to read dashboard, providing granular insight for each individual SKU, with data then rolled up into category and retailer level scores, allowing quick & easy identification of content gaps.

Rather than spend huge amounts of time collecting and compiling data, the automated process and dashboards allowed the agency to spend time fixing issues, optimizing on-site discoverability and building relationships with key retailers. Insights from digital shelf analytics were now powering results, informing conversations, driving transparency and online sales.

The insights we provided empowered the sales & shopper marketing teams to raise informed points and ask questions which positioned them as category leaders with their customers (i.e. retailers).