Ecommerce is now the fastest growing sales channel for consumer packaged goods (CPG), growing 3x faster than traditional retail. With this rapid shift, brands face a fragmentation of the retail landscape across retailer dotcoms, marketplaces, delivery apps, and D2C channels. Managing your products across this complex digital shelf landscape has become mission critical.
This is where digital shelf analytics (DSA) comes in. Powered by big data and automation, DSA gives CPG brands the visibility needed to optimize online product content, pricing, promotions and more across digital channels.
In 2023, DSA is becoming indispensable for ecommerce success. This comprehensive guide will explore what DSA is, its benefits, and how to effectively leverage it in your organization.
What is Digital Shelf Analytics?
Digital shelf analytics refers to using technology to automatically monitor and analyze online product data across digital sales channels like retail websites, marketplaces, and delivery platforms.
DSA evolved as the digital version of physical shelf audits traditionally conducted by brands. But instead of occasional snapshots, DSA provides continuous, real-time monitoring of digital shelf performance.
DSA platforms utilize web scraping, APIs, computer vision, natural language processing and other technologies to extract a wide array of product data including:
- Product content – Title, description, images, video, specs, etc.
- Pricing and promotions – Current price, price history, sales, coupons
- Availability – Inventory levels, out of stocks
- Product rankings – Search page placement, category rankings
- Consumer sentiment – Ratings, reviews, questions
This data is aggregated into dashboards, analytics, and alerts that offer actionable insights. Teams access this intelligence through web and mobile apps.
Example of a digital shelf analytics dashboard
Unlike manual market research, DSA provides the scale, speed, consistency and interconnectivity required in omnichannel commerce.
The Value of Digital Shelf Analytics
Implementing DSA delivers a range of benefits:
Omnichannel visibility – View product data in one place across all digital shelves – retailers, marketplaces, D2C.
Optimized content – Ensure product titles, descriptions, images, etc. drive conversion across channels.
Lower acquisition costs – Increase organic traffic through search, product page rankings, and discovery.
Competitive pricing – Monitor pricing across channels and adjust dynamically based on market data.
Improved forecasting – Factor trends like review sentiment into sales projections.
Enhanced trade fund productivity – Ensure promotions achieve sales lift across retailers.
Informed shelf negotiations – Benchmark share of voice to negotiate optimal shelf space.
Faster reaction times – Real-time alerts when products go out of stock or new competitor products launch.
Above all, DSA leads to sales lift and market share growth. Top brands using DSA report 3-5% incremental sales from optimizing digital shelf execution.
The risks of digital shelf blindness are real. Gartner predicts that 50% of CPG brands without digital shelf insights will lose market share to more digitally-savvy competitors by 2025.
Digital Shelf Use Cases
DSA improves execution across a spectrum of ecommerce capabilities:
Product Content Optimization – Brands can rapidly update product content across retailers when changing packaging, ingredients, or marketing. By testing content variations, they optimize conversion.
Localized Content – For global brands, DSA ensures locally relevant product information in each market.
Lower Acquisition Costs – By fixing technical SEO issues identified by DSA monitoring, brands improve organic rankings and visibility.
Pricing Intelligence – DSA pricing data powers competitive pricing strategies and negotiations with retailers on price gaps.
Promotion Optimization – Sales lift by channel and retailer from promotions are measured to optimize trade spending.
New Product Launches – DSA identifies untapped distribution opportunities for new products and tracks uptake.
Inventory Management – Out of stock alerts prevent lost sales and optimize order quantities based on channel demand.
Retail Media – DSA data helps create high-performing sponsored ad campaigns on retail media networks.
Omnichannel Analytics – A unified view of performance across physical and digital shelves improves integrated strategies.
These use cases span departments from ecommerce and digital marketing to shopper marketing, category management, trade marketing, and more.
Implementing Digital Shelf Analytics
Here are best practices for getting started with DSA:
Choose the right DSA partner – Select a platform that seamlessly integrates DSA data with your technology stack and business processes. Prioritize actionability.
Focus on priority products and retailers – When launching DSA, start with your core products and top 5-10 digital retailers. Expand over time.
Democratize the data – Ensure all teams can access insights through analytics tools, BI platforms, and mobile apps.
Monitor what matters – Curate the metrics monitored to the 20% of KPIs that matter most. Avoid "analysis paralysis."
Enable self-service – Empower teams to self-serve data for faster, decentralized decisions.
Connect cross-functional response teams – When insights require action, having digital shelf response teams in place accelerates execution.
Track business impact – Quantify the sales and profit contribution of improvements driven by DSA to showcase ROI.
Communicate results – Share digital shelf success stories internally to gain more resources and enthusiasm.
The keys are starting with a targeted approach and building positive momentum by tracking business outcomes – seller conversion, traffic, sales, etc. With DSA adoption accelerating, brands should view it as a competitive necessity for ecommerce success.
The Future of Digital Shelf Analytics
We are just scratching the surface of DSA‘s potential:
Predictive analytics will enable brands to forecast how digital actions will impact offline sales based on influence patterns.
Automated decision engines can be trained to optimize digital shelf execution using AI and ML.
Expanded in-store monitoring will unify digital shelf data with physical store audits and shelf sensor data.
Enriched partner collaboration between brands and retailers will mutually improve DSA insights.
New touchpoints like connected TV and voice commerce will be integrated into holistic digital shelf optimization.
DSA is becoming the compass guiding brands to ecommerce growth by converting shelf visibility into commercial advantage.
Conclusion
DSA has quickly become essential for CPG brands navigating fragmented digital shelves. The data and insights generated allow brands to optimize online product discoverability, merchandising, competitive pricing, omnichannel performance and more.
2028 will likely be the year that the majority of CPG brands adopt DSA. Laggards risk losing market share as consumer buying shifts online.
With ecommerce growth accelerating, DSA is becoming integral to unlocking the online sales potential ahead. The time to embrace digital shelf analytics is now.
