September 30, 2022 Guest opinion piece
As growing numbers of consumers shift to shopping online, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to implement well-thought-out ecommerce strategies in order to meet the needs of their customers and ensure the visibility of their products. As part of this, retailers must not only have a solid grasp of consumer algorithms, effective keywords, and search trends, but also a detailed understanding of the products they sell.
Today, any business selling on can – and should – analyse traffic to gain a better understanding of their audience, effectively use keywords to reach new consumers within their target demographic and take advantage of search algorithms to help put their brand at the forefront of search pages.
Analysing traffic to understand your audience
While adopting an up-to-date ecommerce strategy is a challenge that many businesses are yet to overcome, in many cases the solution is relatively simple; ensuring access to accurate data that both businesses and consumers can trust.
The best place to start is by analysing online performance so far. If you want to increase sales within a target audience, you first have to understand the needs and demands of the consumers you are targeting. It is therefore advisable to begin with in-depth customer analysis to gain a better understanding of their key profiles, which can be categorised by age, gender, interests, location, etc.
By building out these customer profiles, you will gain a more accurate representation of different their aspects which, in turn, will help allow you to deliver the right marketing content to the right customer at the right time. This can also highlight behavioural trends that can then be used to filter online traffic to and identify patterns, such as which keywords are performing well, which product pages are having the highest click rate, and so on.
Understanding these patterns will not only help you create more effective, targeted advertorial and SEO content to boosts engagement with your existing audience, but will also help you target new customers within the same demographic.
Effectively using keywords
Once you have a better understanding of your audience, you can begin to build out the optimal product pages to target them. Keywords will play a key role in boosting the visibility of your products but it is important to stay aware of which terms are dipping (or increasing) in search trend volumes.
One of the easiest ways to look at the popularity of a keyword is through data available on Google Trends. This free tool allows you to look at selected keywords either in a specific region over a specific period of time. This is particularly useful if you are focusing on a certain country. For example, you were selling a selection of trousers, it would be more appropriate to call the item “trousers” in the UK, but in the US, “pants” would yield better results. As such, checking Google Trends will guide you towards the keywords with the greatest volume of searches.
Google Trends also enables you to monitor any trends associated with your keywords. For example, hand sanitiser has been readily available online for years, but as more and more people searched for it throughout the pandemic, Google Trends was able to demonstrate search volume growth over the past three years, highlighting when when it began, and began to slow down.
Taking advantage of algorithms
Every search engine has a unique algorithm that helps retrieve specific information from within a platform’s data structure. This helps the search engine determine the relevance of each web page it returns in the search results so it is important that all your pages and product listings are structured to ensure visibility.
Taking advantage of algorithms can be harder for smaller businesses and independent retailers who may not have access to a global platform or an established audience. Marketplaces can therefore be a huge benefit in providing a well-structured platform for any business looking to grow their sales and and put their products in front of their target demographic.
For example, at Fruugo, to help support sellers in generating sales and increasing product conversion, we built a propriety algorithm that predicts how likely it is that a product will generate sales.
Our Product Potency calculator leverages the vast amounts of data we hold from working with millions of products from hundreds of categories in over 40 countries and more than 30 languages all over the world. It can be used to examine different products brands, categories, shipping prices, etc. to inform your approach and targets.
The algorithm uses this historical data to score the importance of each product attribute which are then used to determine the likelihood of a sale. Rather than outputting a binary (yes/no) answer, sales potential is expressed as a probability on a scale between zero and one. The data then influences the way in which we approach the advertising of each product in order to maximise your chances of success.
Data-driven strategies
For anyone looking to establish their brand in the ecommerce industry, analysing and utilising data is a necessity. It can help you gain a better understanding of your customer' needs, quicky spot consumer trends, optimise your onsite experience, review and resolve underperforming sectors, and forecast future sales - all of which will prove to have a positive impact on the business.
Furthermore, by selling on marketplaces, you will gain access to a whole new world of data from millions of consumers across the globe. With this information, sellers can enrich their own insights with varying consumer trends from different demographics.
Marketplaces also work to optimise user experiences on your behalf and will utilise search algorithms to promote your products to a wider audience. In this way, marketplaces can offer a quick and simple solution to immediately improve the potency of online sales, especially for start-up e-retailers aiming to reduce the costs associated with optimising their own websites.
