New Unified Analytics Dashboards
Three new dashboards have been added to Unified Analytics: Improve Product Sales, Adjust Ad Spend, and Explore Sales Data. Check them out below.
Improve Product Sales Dashboard
Data-driven decisions are often limited by summary dashboards that only show catalog-wide performance. For top-selling products, inventory and marketing decisions should be made with SKU-specific data for the best results. This is particularly acute for brands with few products that make up a high percentage of revenue. By blending inventory and marketing data, Unified Analytics' new Improve Product Sales dashboard can help users fine tune spend and inventory to shape customer demand at the product level.
Discovery Tab
The Discovery tab displays an executive summary of sales performance, sales forecast, and current inventory levels filtered for a specific product. At a quick glance, you can see how many days of stock are on hand:
The bottom part of the Discovery tab shows helpful context around who is buying the product, from what location, and how it compares to other products in the catalog:
Attribution Tab
After analyzing a product in the Discovery tab, the Analysis tab takes it a step further. We’ve blended storefront & marketing data to let the user explore what channels and campaigns are driving sales to this product. This knowledge allows a brand to focus on potential actions they may need to take depending on their desired performance & inventory levels:
- Increase Demand: The product has too much inventory relative to forecasted demand. Marketing spend should be shifted towards this product.
- Decrease Demand: The product is scheduled to go out-of-stock before new inventory arrives. Marketing spend should be shifted away from this product.
The Attribution tab is designed to identify which campaigns can be used to shape demand with minimal impact to other products.
At the bottom of the Attribution tab, the Campaign Impact Scores table displays all active campaigns driving revenue for the product and calculates an Impact Score, allowing users to assess item-level attribution. Campaigns with high impact scores are perfect candidates for fine tuning demand.
To validate other SKUs that might be affected by adjustments to this campaign, users can click on a campaign to filter the Examining Product Density chart. Product Density measures the percentage of revenue that the selected product represents for a given campaign. Since a campaign can drive revenue to many different products, Product Density allows you to focus on the impact a campaign may have on one specific product. Any adjustment to a campaign with a low product density (< 50%) could cause an unintended halo effect on other products (whether good or bad).
Workflow with Demand Forecasting
Demand Forecasting and Improve Product Sales used together are the perfect tool for brands to streamline their ecommerce operations. Below, we’ll briefly highlight how the features work together to combat stockouts and excess inventory. Check out this post for a recap on Demand Forecasting.
The relationship between inventory and advertising is delicate: The Journal of Business and Retail Management estimates that stockouts impact 15% of all promotional campaigns and are responsible for 5% of all sales lost. Meanwhile, 30% of working capital expense comes from excess inventory. This leaves brands in a pinch. Should you hold more inventory to prevent stockouts at the risk of added storage costs? Or vice versa? With Unified Analytics, brands will have a workflow they can use to actively keep inventory and demand balanced.
Adjust Ad Spend Dashboard
As consumer appetite softens with the economy, now is the time to double down on high-impact marketing efforts and cut underperforming campaigns. Brands need to find efficient ways to stretch their budget without sacrificing demand generation.
The Adjust Ad Spend dashboard provides actionable, campaign-specific recommendations that can generate more revenue without increasing the advertising budget. Powered by Unified Analytics’ Attribution AI and Cart’s marketing expertise, the Adjust Ad Spend dashboard helps brands optimize their marketing investment by shifting spend to the most effective channels and campaigns.
Channel Recommendations
The top row of Adjust Ad Spend is dedicated to optimizing marketing spend across channels.
The Current Distribution of Spend chart displays the brand’s current spend and return on advertising spend (ROAS) by channel to contextualize the impact on overall performance. The Recommended Spend Distribution chart then recommends how to reallocate that spend for the best return based on historical performance.
Campaign Recommendations
The Campaign Recommendations chart takes optimization one step further than marketing channel with campaign-level recommendations to improve ROAS. Users can click on a campaign to see details, historical performance, and ranking relative to other campaigns in the Campaign Detail view.
Each campaign is tagged with one of the following recommendations based on budget and performance:
- Continue Scaling: Campaigns with material budget and high ROAS. We recommend continued budget scaling until ROAS hits the point of diminishing returns.
- Increase Spend: Campaigns that are exceeding ROAS goals without a large budget. We recommend increasing spend.
- Reduce Spend: Campaigns that may have reached the point of diminishing returns. We recommend lowering spend to see if ROAS increases. If it does not, consider changing ad content or audience parameters.
- Review Campaign: Campaigns that are underperforming with limited budget. We recommend changing content or audience parameters to improve performance.
Explore Sales Data Dashboard
The new Explore Sales Data dashboard, added to the Explore module, contains a set of visualizations to help users analyze and export sales data to answer any questions they have about their sales.
Users can look at detail rows, trends, and growth across six key sales measures with a variety of filter and visualization options.
Additionally, users can review the Seasonality tab to examine how key sales KPIs vary by time of year for certain products or their entire catalog.
Storefront Features & Updates
Bulk Shipping Label Creation
Cart Shipping has added Bulk Labels, which allows brands to create shipping labels for multiple orders at once. Users can now skip the repetitive, time-consuming task of one-at-a-time label creation and instead generate them in batches.
Access this feature from the orders page:
- Select orders ready for shipment
- Get rates for the entire batch
- Generate a single PDF for packing slips and shipping labels
Additional Cart Shipping Improvements:
- Printing packing slip and shipping label from the same page
- Product details on the label printing page for reference while packing an order
- New merge code for items that have not yet shipped for orders with partial shipments
Shipping Labels is now in open beta. Read this for more details on the initial launch.
Refund Reasons
Brands can now select refund reasons when issuing refunds in Storefront to better record and understand the problems shoppers face that result in a refund.
Step 1: Define Refund Reasons
Visit the refunds settings page to select which refund reasons should be available. Default refund reasons are available, or users can customize their own.
Step 2: Select a refund reason when issuing refunds
Feed Marketing Integration with Storefront
Brands that use Storefront can now easily import their product catalog into Feed Marketing and take advantage of its powerful suite of feed optimization tools and 2000+ marketing channels as a lever to drive demand to their stores and products.
Additional Storefront Improvements:
- Performance - Storefront Admin and Shopper experiences are now faster due to backend performance improvements. Additionally, widgets are now lazy loaded to improve shopper load times. Blog tags have been added for better SEO optimization.
- Security/Passwords - Shoppers and brands can now use passwords of up to 64 characters to meet modern password and security best practices.
- Rewards in Checkout - Brands can now choose to show reward points in checkout so shoppers can more easily use the points they’ve earned by being a loyal shopper.
- Attentive Integration - Brands can reach more customers and increase conversion by using Attentive's Conversational Commerce platform. Attentive gives you the tools to deliver timely messages that your customers want to receive.
- Permissions - Four new permissions have been added to give brands more granular control of their payment and tax management settings.
View Storefront’s most recent release here.
Feed Marketing Launches Competitor Monitoring Tool
Feed Marketing has officially launched Price Watch, a tool for sellers to monitor competitor pricing on Google Shopping and react quickly with optimized listings. Price Watch ingests pricing and product information from competitors via Google Shopping and provides sellers with intelligence on:
- Price ranking relative to competitors for each product
- Cheapest competitor price for each product
- Competitor catalogs (including both products and price)
Equipped with this feature, users can out-maneuver their competitors by adapting their pricing and listings to achieve the right balance of margin with competitive prices. Price Watch also helps sellers save precious time by avoiding the manual, repetitive work of searching competitor listings to collect data that quickly becomes outdated.