From initial awareness to final purchase, the online consumer journey offers brands more touchpoints than ever before to reach shoppers. But as the eCommerce marketplace grows in complexity, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential KPIs to track. It’s no wonder brands feel they’re still behind on establishing the right metrics for the right teams.
Source: Profitero, 2024 eCommerce Organizational Benchmark Study
At Profitero, we use our deep expertise in digital shelf tracking and commerce advisory to research which KPIs are truly worth organizing around. Below, we’ve outlined 5 KPIs we believe will be essential for brands to prioritize this year for eCommerce success.
1. Competitor availability
Who should track it: Media, Operations, Insights / Strategy, eComm / Key Account Manager
Why it’s in our top 5: Media is getting more competitive and expensive than ever before: Black Friday 2024 saw a 92% increase in retail media spend over the previous year. But not all channels are equally saturated, and competitor conquesting remains an underutilized tool for driving better media efficiency and brand growth. Brands including Heinz and Philadelphia Cream Cheese have found that targeting out-of-stock competitors with retail media is a proven strategy to win.
What to track:
- Your OOS rate by product at a daily cadence. Are your products vulnerable to conquesting? Are they consistently in-stock to capitalize on competitor slip-ups?
- Your top competitors’ OOS rate at a daily cadence. Where are the conquesting opportunities?
- Competitor activity on your own brand’s search terms. Are you at risk of losing market share during OOS blips?
How Profitero can help: Shelf Intelligent Media automates the process of monitoring your brand & competitor digital shelf signals and boosting retail media efficacy. We integrate with Skai and Pacvue to continuously optimize your media strategies based on triggers such as availability changes and pricing competitiveness.
2. Share of page 1
Who should track it: eComm Manager, Media, Shopper Marketing
Why it’s in our top 5: Boosting product listings to page 1 of search from page 2 is associated with a significant increase in sales. New product launches that fail to achieve strong placement are likely to underperform your sales target.
What to track:
- Share of page 1 over time across relevant keywords for each product
- Which competitors are gaining share of page 1. Are they earning these spots, or buying them?
- Sudden drops in share of page 1 for your products. Flag these to investigate the cause. Is it broken content? Poor reviews? Going out of stock? Competitors crowding you out?
- Percent of your products not reaching page 1. If these are poorly converting products, consider whether they’re worth the investment. If they’re strong converters, boosting share of page 1 will likely yield robust sales growth.
How Profitero can help: We provide comprehensive, daily search placement data across 1300+ retailers and 70+ countries, allowing brands to measure their search success against competitors, diagnose issues, and take quick steps to respond.
3. Review velocity
Who should track it: Shopper Marketing, eComm Manager
Why it’s in our top 5: Ratings and reviews are more important than product content for 85% of consumers, and they strongly influence both online & in-store purchases. When brands increase month-over-month review velocity (the percent of reviews added to a listing), sales and search placement increase.
Profitero’s research finds that the success of new product launches, in particular, depends on a quick ramp up in review count. Finally, product reviews are critical inputs for retailer AI tools (such as Amazon’s Rufus) that aim to influence how shoppers make purchase decisions.
Source: Profitero
What to track:
- Review velocity: how many new reviews are your listings accruing over time, both in raw terms and as a percent of existing reviews?
- How does your review velocity compare to competitors? Are you leading or lagging the category?
- Does sentiment analysis of your new reviews flag any issues with the product or product content?
- What percent of your products are hitting the 4-star rating benchmark? How does that compare against your top competitors?
How Profitero can help: Our eCommerce AI assistant, Ask Profitero, sources insights from comprehensive, daily ratings & reviews data. It can also analyze review sentiment on your listings.
4. Content compliance & benchmark scores
Who should track it: Insights / Strategy, eComm Manager, Media
Why it’s in our top 5: Maintaining content compliance is difficult enough without retailers constantly changing requirements. (Profitero’s analysis found that Amazon’s new product title guidelines will put 2 in 3 brands out of compliance.) Monitoring compliance continuously is essential to avoid suppressed products and sales loss. And strong content is foundational to retail media success – listings with poor or broken content aren’t likely to convert well, and brands should direct that investment elsewhere.
What to track:
- Your products’ live content compliance vs. retailer requirements. Are your products at risk of suppression?
- Consistency of your live content with internal source of truth. Are retailers accurately representing your listings online?
- How your live content compares to retailer and category benchmarks and best practices. Does your content include the right keywords? Is your digital product content adapted to win each retailer’s unique algorithm?
How Profitero can help: In addition to tracking your content compliance day by day, we offer Shelf Intelligent Content, an automated solution that identifies content best practices at each category within each retailer using predictive analytics. Shelf Intelligent Content allows brands to replace ineffective, one-size-fits-all content with continuous optimization across their full portfolio.
5. Pricing competitiveness
Who should track it: Shopper Marketing, Insights / Strategy, Media, eComm / Key Account Manager
Why it’s in our top 5: Price-sensitive consumers are switching brands and trading down to private label brands. Not only do brand pricing strategies need to adapt, but search and media strategies must take note as well. Private label products are claiming increasingly large shares of online search, and media effectiveness is impacted by whether the advertised product offers a compelling value proposition within its category.
What to track:
- Match your SKUs against similar competitor SKUs and compare pricing & promotions. Are your products at risk of losing price competitiveness?
- What third-party competition do you face? Are your products losing the Buy Box?
- What is the private label share of search and sales in your category at each retailer?
- Align your price competitiveness against paid search and retail media investment. How much are you spending to drive visibility to products when they’re not priced competitively? Is your media spend adapting to price fluctuations?
How Profitero can help: Our granular, daily pricing data allows brands to conduct the pricing analyses above, including a comprehensive deep dive into Buy Box threats on Amazon. These pricing insights also power our Shelf Intelligent Media automation to drive better retail media results with greater budget efficiency.
In summary
Democratizing data across the right teams is often easier said than done, but it's an essential step in getting the most from your digital shelf tools. Profitero Advisory has helped countless brands bridge the gap and accelerate omnichannel growth, and I encourage you to request a free consultation with our expert team as your brand assigns priority KPIs this year.