Backing companies to improve discoverability and increase sales: Content Analytics

eCommerce is the fastest (or maybe only) growing channel in retail. It requires optimizing different metrics than in brick & mortar. Content is of critical importance in eCommerce but is virtually irrelevant in a store. Content requires manufacturers to consider different factors than they are used to, such as images, description quality, etc. Content is key to large incumbents maintaining their dominant position or being unseated by upstart brands. This is where Content Analytics steps in. The company was founded in 2014 with a vision for helping manufacturers to optimize their digital content on retailer eCommerce sites. Walmart, its first customer, provided the requirements for how an item page should be optimized with content, for which Content Analytics built a massive proprietary web scraper that crawls millions of item pages to identify content opportunities such as missing images, short titles, poor descriptions, 0 reviews, out of stock, pricing errors, search performance, etc.

The Unique Factor
Content Analytics has three product verticals. 1) Product Catalog (PIM System). This allows manufacturers to warehouse all of their item attributes and content in a secure, cloud storage environment. 2) Content Syndication. An advanced set of tools allowing manufacturers to push the product content to retailer sites to enhance their item pages. 3) ECommerce Analytics. Sales and traffic reporting, In Stock, Content Health Audit, Price Tracking, SEO performance, Buy Box reporting, etc. No other company has both content features as well as analytics features. It has a truly differentiated offering in the market.

The Art of Management
The Content Analytics tools benefit the clients by providing them with a full suite of tools to help them manage their eCommerce businesses with major retail sites (e.g. Amazon, Walmart.com, target.com, etc). There are numerous pain points that the company solves: 1) Poor Content Quality: A vast majority of item pages have poor content quality. This is a significant opportunity because high quality content is critical to customer conversion. Consider how a customer might buy furniture… In a brick and mortar environment, she can sit on a couch, feel the fabric, and visualize how large it would be in her living room. In an eCommerce environment, a robust product description and multiple images including different angles are required so she has enough information to be willing to buy a product without physically touching it. Poor product content is a huge barrier to conversion and driving sales. 2) Time savings- the tools that are available to eCommerce account managers is inefficient and slow. The Content Analytics tools help optimize this by providing account managers with sophisticated yet simple tools that make performing their job much quicker than the status quo. 3) Aggregation of Metrics- most eCommerce sites don’t provide easy access to business metrics to assist account managers. Content Analytics puts all of the necessary metrics right at the fingertips of the account managers.

The Client Dimension
The Content Analytics tools are applicable across all of B2B eCommerce. All product categories are available e.g. Food, Consumer Electronics, Consumables, Health & Wellness, Toys, Furniture, etc. Clients include Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Mattel, PepsiCo, Samsung, Energizer, Pfizer, Bic and more. Content Analytics is rapidly expanding content syndication coverage to multiple retailers. Current coverage is Amazon, Walmart, Target and Sam’s Club. The company intends to integrate with dozens of others soon. It will also roll out a number of new analytics features to constantly deliver increased value to manufacturers such as predictive inventory modeling.

Case Study of a Happy Customer
An international consumer goods company with multiple popular brands knew that if its 2500 products were discoverable on e-commerce sites, consumers would buy. The problem was, the company didn’t know where its products ranked on search results on some 70 retail sites worldwide, and didn’t know specifically what actions to take to ensure visibility.

“We’re making the transition from brick and mortar to online, and we’re discovering how important eMerchandising is,” noted the head of online sales. “Just as you fight for shelf space and visibility in a physical store, it’s critical that your products are visible in the online store.”

Today with Content Analytics, the company knows exactly where its brands and products rank on searches in dozens of retail sites. Content Analytics uses proprietary data crawler technology to collect vast troves of e-commerce data from dozens of sites daily around the globe, and eventually will cover all 70 e-commerce sites for this international company, ensuring that the company knows exactly where its products stand. Every day.

Content Analytics not only tells the company where its products rank, but also what it needs to do to improve its product rankings, including problems such as missing images or video, inadequate product description length, weak or no review, lack of keywords in title and product descriptions, and images not optimized for mobile devices, to name a few.

“Content Analytics is our technology partner of choice in the Omni-channel space. Their platform addresses some of the biggest and most challenging problems today: content and analytics.” – Bryan Gildenberg, Chief Knowledge Officer, Kantar Retail/WPP

“Obtaining high quality product content is one of our top priorities at Walmart. As we build the world’s largest product catalog by scaling from millions to hundreds of millions of products, that problem is becoming ever more important.”
– Ram Rampalli, Director of Product Content, Walmart Stores, Inc.

Meet the Key Executive

Dave Feinleib, Founder & CEO: Dave started his technology career at 12 by learning computer programming. He attended Cornell University and studied Computer Science. He then worked at Microsoft for several years before embarking on his entrepreneurial career including founding technology startups that were acquired by EMC and HP. Dave is a Big Data expert having published numerous papers and securing several patents on the subject and has authored the book, “Why Startups Fail”. David is a sought-after speaker and the producer of Big Data TV. Content Analytics is the current evolution of his Big Data expertise.

“It is a challenge to keep up with the current technology, we are on the cutting edge of this by constantly monitoring even minute changes to retailer sites.”