The e-commerce world is changing rapidly, and data is the catalyst. Online retailers are increasingly relying on insights extracted from web data to guide their pricing strategies and find the best time to launch products and services.
A recent survey found that some 87% of e-commerce businesses have increased their web data collection and management budgets in the past 12 months – with more than a third (38%) increasing their budgets by more than 10%, and 25% increasing their budgets over the past year.
Broadly speaking, web data gives e-commerce businesses increased visibility in a competitive online marketplace. This set of information provides insight into anything from current sales offers to product pricing to positioning to consumer reviews. While the applications for this important resource are countless, online retailers typically collect public web data for one core reason: Using web data, retailers can benchmark their competitors by comparing and monitoring prices for the same products that compete directly with their own sites. This helps answer questions like: How much are their competitors charging? Do they have any sales or special offers? What about shipping costs? Is there a pattern to the way they raise and lower prices? Reliably knowing the answers to these questions is essential to succeeding in today’s fast-moving e-commerce environment, which is why more than a third (34%) of e-commerce businesses collect web data to compare competitor pricing to their own inventory. Some even automate the entire process to allow for the deployment of successful dynamic pricing models.
Positioning and Inventory
In addition to revealing hidden insights into pricing, web data also provides information about how online retailers can best position their products to the public.
Using this information, online retailers can work to identify specific keywords or messaging to help their products rank higher in searches – essentially helping them make smarter and more strategic marketing decisions by learning from the best.
Some e-commerce businesses go even further and use web data to uncover new merchandising and product opportunities by tracking competitors’ online inventory.
This strategy is particularly useful for multinational businesses looking to launch products in new, unknown markets, and can also help smaller retailers identify new products to sell that are currently popular on popular online marketplaces.
Search Engine Strategy
According to the research, many e-commerce businesses (about 58%) continuously collect SERP (Search Engine Results Page) web data, which focuses on paid and organic search results for different keywords and queries entered into search engines.
SERP web data is often used by digital marketers to develop strategies for brand sentiment, online reputation management (ORM) and improving keyword rankings to modify his positioning and visibility in search engines.
It also allows businesses to monitor their competition, discover hidden trends, improve paid advertising, reveal content gaps, and more importantly, understand how their content is performing in different regions.
Overall, SERP web data enables businesses to outperform their competitors on search engine results pages and to take immediate corrective actions in their strategies if further improvements are needed.
Public Opinion Monitoring
Every day, millions of consumer interactions occur on marketplaces, social media, and different forums. More and more e-commerce brands are looking to leverage this information, with research showing that 66% of brands currently collect public network data from social media.
This particular dataset helps social media teams spot changes in consumer behavior and predict the popularity of products and campaigns. It also offers the advantage of being able to adjust strategies in real time, helping companies publish relevant social media content in the moment — because what’s relevant today may no longer be relevant tomorrow.
Overall, the benefits of understanding consumer online reviews are numerous. It can be as simple as learning that you should change the wording in your product description to specify that batteries are not included. Or it could be as complex as discovering an opportunity to create an entirely new product line.
But when it comes to trends driven by social media, e-commerce businesses that are able to react to the market in real time gain a huge advantage over those that cannot.
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