Product Content Monitoring

You notice the wrong product title or an outdated image on an online store – might sound innocuous, but this simple error can cost a company real money. So how do brands ensure their product content remains high-quality and brand-compliant across all channels? The answer: automated product content monitoring.

The Mission: Perfect Product Presentation Across All Sales Platforms

Brands channel serious energy into their product and presentation development and spend years building up their image. Premium brands in particular leverage targeted presentation to stir up an emotional response in their customers. And when it comes to e-commerce, it falls to the product page content to get all of this across as one of the primary drivers behind purchasing decisions for online shoppers.

E-commerce or channel managers, among others, now have to ensure this brand image comes across in all sales channels with their product presentation – that holds true in the company’s own D2C store, in retailer stores, on marketplaces and on other platforms.

It’s their job to make sure that their product content:

• complies with brand guidelines at all times, 
• is complete and correct, and
• is optimized for the highest possible conversion rate on each respective channel.

The Challenge: The Lack of Control Over Content That Spans Thousands of Product Pages

When it comes to indirect sales, the biggest challenge most manufacturers face is protecting their own brand. It goes without saying that manufacturers maintain product content in their own systems and make this information available to retailers or platforms – either automatically via interfaces or manually as an export. But that doesn’t mean the content will appear exactly the same there!

In fact, the following can happen:

• Errors crop up in the transfer. The content is either incomplete or incorrectly assigned.
• Retailers fail to adopt the content as per manufacturer specifications, instead changing it. That could be deliberately or by mistake.
• Live content is outdated. Content updates or promotional content either aren’t incorporated or are incorporated too late.

After all, manufacturers don’t get feedback on what content is being used on which channels. It falls to them to monitor how each of their products is presented online. For those with a small product range, this may still be possible manually. But for those with thousands of items and multiple sales channels, that just isn’t the case. Doing as little as making regular spot checks and checking in on the content of the top sellers quickly starts eating away at the hours. Plenty of errors go undetected and there is barely any time left over for content optimization. And if manufacturers ignore the problem, they effectively take a truly measurable economic hit.  

The Risks of Poor Product Content

Poor product content is more than a minor inconvenience; it can have a direct impact. In fact, one study revealed that 53 percent of consumers surveyed said they would “very likely never again” buy from a brand where they had received incorrect product information. And one in three had already abandoned their shopping carts because they deemed the product description or photos just not good enough.

Incorrect, incomplete or non-brand-compliant product content can have the following consequences:

• The brand experience isn’t consistent across all channels.
• Customers come away with a more negative perception of the product and brand.
• Customers are confused when products are presented differently on different channels (inconsistent brand experience).
• Customers are reluctant to buy because the information doesn’t seem trustworthy.
• Return rates rise because customers have been given incorrect or insufficient information.
• Products receive worse ratings and reviews because of customer experiences.
• Customers can’t find products with incorrect descriptions using the search function.
• Products are positioned worse on marketplaces and in stores (because of ranking algorithms).

In short, poor product content impacts sales for the worse and increases the costs associated with returns. As if that weren’t enough, it also affects the customer experience and can even damage the brand image, while manufacturers are forced to up their spending on retail media to compensate for losing their place (or places) in the rankings.

The Solution: Monitor Each and Every Product Page With Product Content Monitoring

It takes an automated solution to monitor content across thousands of product pages. Which is exactly where product content monitoring software comes in: it crawls all available products and content on accessible e-commerce platforms, analyzes the data according to preset criteria and preps it clearly for managers in the form of dashboards. This way, it flags up errors and areas of potential at a glance so managers can take action.

Product content monitoring provides answers to the following questions:

• Is the product content published on the retailer’s site (or on the marketplace) complete?
• Is the product content aligned with brand guidelines? Have the key parts of the delivered content been adopted?
  • Is the product title clear and descriptive?
  • Is the core of the product description present?
  • Is the title image appealing and in keeping with brand guidelines?
  • Are the images shown displayed in the best order?
• Has the retailer posted new product content, such as the latest image or promotional banner?
• Are advertising allowances being used for campaigns as agreed?
• Is the content optimized for the respective channel to achieve better rankings and conversions?

Additional metrics reveal where product content is in the green across the board for completeness and compliance or where action is needed:

• Content Completeness Score: Are all elements – we’re talking title, description, key words, images, specifications, etc. – complete or are key details missing?
• Content Compliance Score: Is the content correct and brand-compliant? Are texts the right length and are there enough images? Is all the most relevant information included?

Product content monitoring is also an option for keeping an eye on competitor products. Why not take the bestsellers on a given platform as the benchmark? And comparison just might uncover optimization potential for your own products.

The Result: Fantastic Customer Experience for E-Commerce Success

Put simply, there’s no trying on a product for size in an online store. Which is why good content is everything. Content has to fulfill the role of showcase, product presentation and sales assistant all at once. Content determines the lion’s share of the customer experience even before they ever make a purchase. All this means unique product content helps a brand to stand out from the crowd – even where, realistically, products are relatively interchangeable. Brands protect their premium reputation and the foundation for their success.

The baseline: Content has to be consistently high-quality across all channels – a goal that product content monitoring with DATA STEWARD empowers manufacturers to achieve. Automation means monitoring can be scaled, regardless of the size of the product range or number of channels. Managers maintain a solid overview, freeing up their time for targeted content optimization.

DATA STEWARD can be directly connected to PIM systems like Informatica, Akeneo or Contentserv, making the solution even more valuable. This way, it enables a “closed loop” from data generation through distribution and data analysis and back into the product data system. Plus, automated notifications and tasks save time and highlight specific action points.

And as if that weren’t enough, the solution is also integrated in the XPLN Suite for Digital Shelf Analytics, which can monitor product availability, keyword rankings, sale prices and ratings. All this means the suite gives a 360-degree view of e-commerce performance across all channels.