The 5 datasets for understanding your product performance

One of the biggest challenges Amazon and Walmart brands face is understanding what’s driving their performance changes.

Let’s say one of your top products has seen its sales decline over the last couple months. It’s easy to see that something is wrong, but it is much harder to pinpoint why. You might naturally ask:?

Is the problem with your advertising? Are you not spending enough, or are your campaigns themselves not performing as well as they once were??

Is the problem with your competitor advertising? Are you being outspent or out-manuevered on your previously best keywords??

Is the problem an organic rank change? Maybe your product has fallen in the organic search results on Amazon, and that is partly explaining why your overall sales are down. Your ads could be just as effective as before, but if you’re organically less visible, you’ll feel that pain.?

Is the problem with price? Is your price changing impacting outcomes, or perhaps has your competitor cut their price??

These are not easy questions to answer when your data is fractured across silos. Part of your job is to figure out not just why performance changes but also whether you should be concerned about those changes.?

At Intentwise, we talk a lot about the importance of building a complete picture of performance. Below, we’ll break down what it takes to build this view.?

Specifically, here are five essential datasets every brand should own and integrate.?

What are the 5 datasets for a full view of your business??

The savviest brands will have a strategy for collecting—and owning—many different critical datasets.?

#1. Advertising data. This is in some ways the foundational data set for marketers. On Amazon, that means having ready access to data from your DSP and Sponsored Ads, including ad spend, revenue, costs per click, clickthrough rate, conversion rates, campaign types, and more.?

#2. Retail data. You can’t begin to unpack why one of your products is seeing its sales decline if you don’t have ready access to your retail data. This means tracking your sales, inventory, pricing, Buy Box performance, organic rankings, Best Seller Rank (BSR), and more.

#3. Brand-specific data. Now, let’s get a little more complicated. To unlock a truly full-scale view of performance, you need more than just the raw retail and ad numbers.?

You also need to port in the brand-specific information that lets you segment—and contextualize—your performance numbers.?

For every product, you want to layer on data about product categories, unit costs, sub-brands, brand terms, and cross-channel product IDs.?

This metadata helps you view and analyze performance from a lens that makes sense to you and is specific to you.

This dataset should also include the first-party data from your website, from physical retail stores, and more.?

Through AMC, you can actually connect that 1P data to your Amazon data to see more clearly how your website and your physical footprint work in tandem with your Amazon presence.?

#4. Competitive intelligence. You can’t have a firm grasp on how your products are performing if you don’t also have a window into how your competitors are performing.?

It’s essential to pull in data about your Share of Voice, to see how you fare relative to competition. If your product’s Share of Voice is shrinking compared to your competitors, for instance, that might explain why your sales are declining.?

You should also lean on the Search Query Performance report, which is now easily downloadable via API for 3P sellers, in order to see your market penetration at a granular level.?

Your product doesn’t exist in a vacuum—seeing how you stack up compared to your rivals is essential for deciding your next plan of action.?

#5. Shopper insights. The final dataset tracks how shoppers move through all of these different touchpoints with you.?

On the ad side: How do different ad formats work in tandem to drive sales??

Your upper-funnel ads might not convince a ton of shoppers to buy from you on first touch—but if you’re able to track the full path to purchase, maybe you’ll find that they were an essential early node in the shopper journey.?

On the retail side: Which of your products have the highest repeat purchase rate? Which products are the best at driving new shoppers to your brand, meaning they have the highest New-To-Brand rate??

When you bring in shopper insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can not only see more clearly who your shoppers are but also how all of your marketing fits together.?

How do I sort through all of these datasets??

Owning and integrating these datasets is the fastest way to accelerate insights and take decisive action.?

Brands and agencies I speak with spend a significant amount of time filling data gaps—time that could be better spent on high-level strategy.?

And if this sounds like a lot of data to take in at once, I get it. That’s why the new possibilities of generative AI on software platforms are so exciting. Soon, it’s going to take just a few seconds to summarize all of these datasets.

If you’re looking to streamline this process and accelerate your journey, feel free to leave a comment. Also, if there’s a key dataset I missed, let me know—I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(As always, you can read this newsletter directly on our website.)

What we’re reading:?

So far, only 13% of shoppers buy from Amazon Haul every month, about half the number that shops on rivals like Temu and Shein.?

How has the PPC ad market changed in the last decade—and where is it going next? Clear Ads CEO George Meressa breaks it all down on our podcast.?

Best Buy is getting in on the affiliate economy, letting influencers build their own digital storefronts on its e-commerce website.?