Competitive Intelligence Papers and Case Studies
PAPERS
Six Best Practices for Competitor Price Monitoring
You know your strategy and your brand positioning and have a pretty good idea of how you compare to your competitors, so is there a need to monitor their pricing in detail? The answer is almost certainly yes. If your products compete with other companies for the affections of shoppers, you need to know what those competitors are doing and when they are doing it. Regular and accurate pricing, promotion, and assortment monitoring helps you know your competition so you can stay ahead of them when in the planning stage, ensure you are meeting your seasonal goals, and provides you with the information you need to make pricing, promotion, and assortment decisions to achieve your profit goals.
Competitor Price Monitoring Approaches: Mapping Versus Crawling
There are two methods used to provide competitor product intelligence, including competitor price monitoring data. The first is by far the most common and involves sending spiders to crawl predefined websites for identical products based on the item name and/or SKU number. The second method is mapping products based on rules and attributes identified by the originating retailer.
The first method, based on automation, is far cheaper, but assumes that all retailers will use identical or similar names for products or publish the manufacturers’ SKU number. As we know, neither of these reliably occurs. What a manufacturer might call a “Brand X Children’s Cuddler”, one retailer may call a “Baby Snuggle Blanket”. Also, most companies provide their own part number, if any, not the part number of SKU provided by the manufacturer.
Manual mapping is far more expensive than automatic crawling, but provides several benefits. First, it can provide more data, more accurately by having products properly mapped. Second, it allows the flexibility to map not only identical products, but any items that a retailer deems to be competing with its products.
Ways to Drive Sales Using Competitor Content Monitoring
Providing better online product content than your competitors’ drives more website visitors, increases sales, and decreases returns. Efficient, consistent competitor content monitoring can help you quickly create a superior shopping experience, while also providing you with insights to adjustments in competitors’ strategies.
Continue reading to learn how competitor content monitoring can help you track changes in competitor strategy, drive website traffic, increase sales, and decrease returns:
Five Reasons to Monitor Competitors Prices
You know your strategy and your brand positioning and have a pretty good idea of how you compare to your competitors, so is there a need to monitor their pricing in detail? The answer is almost certainly yes. If your products compete with other companies for the affections of shoppers, you need to know what those competitors are doing and when they are doing it. Regular and accurate pricing, promotion, and assortment monitoring helps you know your competition so you can stay ahead of them when in the planning stage, ensure you are meeting your seasonal goals, and provides you with the information you need to make pricing, promotion, and assortment decisions to achieve your profit goals.
Online Price Monitoring for Store-Based Retailers
All retailers need good competitor pricing intelligence gathered accurately and efficiently. However, the traditional method of having merchandisers gather data by going store-to-store is expensive, time-consuming, and incomplete.
Online product pricing intelligence provides beneficial information to all retailers, whether online or store-based. Store-based retailers have three main competitors: other store-based retailers, online retailers, and online marketplaces. Online pricing intelligence reflects accurate data for all three of these competitors.
Seven Reasons to Monitor Your Competitors’ Content
Competitor content tracking provides you with information needed to meet your overall marketing position and pricing goals by providing you with current and trending data. Read on for seven strategic reasons why monitoring your competitors’ online product content gives you a strategic edge.
Read on for seven key reasons to monitor your competitors’ content.
CASE STUDIES
Competitor Price Monitoring Comparing Bundled and Bulk Products to Competitors’ Item Price
The client sells bundled and bulk discounted items and wanted to be able to compare their prices to those of their competitors. As their competitors do not bundle or bulk items, they needed a competitor price monitoring solution that would break out the bundled and bulk items to individual prices and accurately compare the unit prices to those of their competitors.
Comparing In-Store Only Items to Competitor Online Prices and Assortments
The client wanted to generate massive quantities of accurate competitive pricing and assortment data that could be integrated into their internal solution. They wanted to use the data not only to better price their products, but also to have a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape on private label items.
They also needed to know which of their store-only products were being sold online be their competitors and at what price.
Comparing Private Label to Competitor Brand Pricing
The client wanted to generate massive quantities of accurate competitive pricing and assortment data that could be integrated into their internal solution. They wanted to use the data not only to better price their products, but also to have a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape on private label items.
Pure Online Specialty Retailer Grows Sales Through Competitor Price Monitoring Integrated With In-House Tool
To compete online in a highly competitive market the client needed accurate, reliable retail competitive intelligence data that it could use to make pricing and assortment decisions and that would feed into their in-house business intelligence platform.
Competitor Price Monitoring Solution Requiring Private Label and Similar Product Monitoring
The client wanted to expand their competitive position in the online market. They needed a competitor price monitoring solution that would provide complete and reliable data that they could count on to make strategic pricing and assortment decisions that would help promote their sales and margins. They client had an existing pricing intelligence partner but was not satisfied with the versatility of the solution or the accuracy of the data. They needed a competitive intelligence solution that provided data that could be relied upon as accurate, provided improved mapping, full customization, and private label monitoring.
How a Large Retailer Used Competitive Price Tracking to Grow Sales
The client wanted to generate competitive pricing, promotional, and assortment tracking information that could be used online and in store to:
- check if their price position was where they wanted it to be and, if not, to have the data to make adjustments
- use current and historical data to make improved promotional decisions
Learn how they turned to PriceTrac as their solution and how they have used the data for the last three years.
MarketPlace Daily Deal Solution
The client’s goal was to create a “Daily Deal” process that would provide the best current price in the marketplace. They targeted one deal for each designated category, resulting in several deals each day. The client wanted its promotion to be at least 8% lower in price than other major retailer sites.
Learn how they turned to PriceTrac as their solution and how they have used the data for the last three years.
Content Solutions Papers and Case Studies
PAPERS
Attribution Equals Sales
Attribution is the process of adding relevant information for items in a catalog. An attribute is anything that describes a product; examples include weight, material, brand, style, and dimensions. Providing more details helps search engine spiders find and categorize your products, online visitors find your products, and then provides shoppers with the information needed to make a purchasing decision. The more complete the attributes, the better the results in each area.
While many companies understand the need for attribution, they are often held up by the amount of time and effort it takes to provide attributes for thousands of SKUs. With the added burden of short selling seasons for many products, especially fashion items, product attributes are often not fully provided to the shopper, resulting in fewer sales for the retailer. Outsourcing the attribution project can lead to better identified attribute categories and more fully complete data within a desired time and budget frame.
12 Steps to Writing Papers for Link Building
Everyone wants to be number one on the Google search landing page, but getting there is a lot of work and staying there can never be taken for granted. Google has made it clear that one of the best ways to rank high is to generate high quality content, with keyword links back to your website.
Follow the twelve steps to start your link building campaign.
CASE STUDIES
Attribution Sheets for Large Home Interiors Company
The client is a large, high-end home furnishings company with several specialty stores. Their store brand names are recognized over a wide range of age demographics. The company uses Internet, catalog, and traditional retail to sell its products. They generated over $1 Billion in online sales for 2010 and are focused on continuing to grow their Internet presence.
Prior to this project, the client had only product descriptions and a basic level of attribution (brand, material, color, finish, style) for the items on their website. They wanted complete product attributes on their targeted web pages. The client’s goal was to add product attribution to create a better shopping experience for the consumer. This included making navigation throughout the website easier and then, once the client found the product they wanted, providing enough information to make a buying decision.
Research Cataloging and Writing Project
The client’s goal was to outperform all competitors and become the largest resource for relevant industry information through a virtual library. They wanted their reference library to have the most categories and the largest variety of media sources (articles, audio, blogs, case studies, etc.).
German Product Content Internationalization
The client was expanding into Germany and had a .de website to which it would be adding local items. They needed a partner to add these SKUs to their new German website. The project included:
- writing descriptive content for each set of product collections
- gathering product details for each SKU
- mapping images to products
- mapping product attributes within the client tool
MarketPlace Cataloging
The client works with thousands of resellers around the globe, with a huge disparity of cataloging knowledge. The client wanted to ensure that the integrity of its catalog was maintained so that buyers were able to have an improved shopping experience by being able to quickly and easily find what they were looking for. Ultimately, this would also lead to the sellers having a positive selling experience. To accomplish this, it was critical that all items were cataloged properly and quickly. Due to the large volume of items and seasonal increases, they needed a partner that could supply knowledgeable, flexible staff to review the catalog daily.
Image Editing for Top International Retailer
The client needed product images for their website with a standard style, showing a variety of angles, to give the web visitor a strong virtual shopping experience. The client sells a wide selection of brands and receives images of varying quality from its assorted manufacturers. To overcome this, the client has photographers shoot each product with a standard set of views. They needed a partner solution to retouch the images and make them web-ready.
A second important aspect of this project was that the images had to be optimized by size, making the images clear, while opening quickly.
Finally, the client was looking for a partner that could handle a large quantity of images, meeting deadlines, providing a high quality product, all at a reasonable cost.
Video Description Writing
The client has hundreds of videos on YouTube that link back to their various websites, but they were not receiving high rankings in Google or YouTube. The project was to add keyword-rich descriptions to the videos in a way that would engage the customer while increasing search engine results.
Link Building for Large Home Furnishings Company
The client had three main goals for this project:
- Increase their online presence
- Drive website traffic
- Improve their SERP (search engine results page) rankings of specific keywords, including their brands
To accomplish this, they wanted a solid white-hat SEO strategy. One of the best, but most time-consuming ways to achieve increased SEO is to add quality inbound links. To accomplish this, they wanted to have a wide variety of relevant and interesting articles and social media snippets written that could be syndicated across the Internet with keyword links back to relevant product pages.
Case Study: Item Set up for Social Shopping Site
The client adds approximately 1,500 new items each month and needed fifteen attribute categories completed for each of these products. After all items are prepared, they needed to be uploaded to the CMS or the spreadsheet.
Item Set-Up for Top 100 Home Goods Website
The client needed ongoing product set up for their main website. The project involved approximate 10,000 items each month, spanning over 100 top-level categories, and 200 manufacturers. Item requests would be submitted daily with an expected 2-day turnaround time, but with the flexibility to have Rush jobs (approximately 15% of the overall project) with same day turnaround. Product information needed to contain appropriate HTML tags.
Case Study: Reclassification Project for Top 10 Online Retailer
To achieve Supply Chain Management (SCM) efficiency and reduce language barriers caused by internationalization, the client used the Global Product Classification (GPC) structure for its product cataloging. As the GPC and the client’s schematics changed at times, they wanted to make sure that all products were cataloged correctly. Schema changes can be caused by any or all of the following:
- Changes to the category structure
- Addition or deletion of sub-categories / categories
- Addition or deletion of attributes
- Addition or deletion of attribute values
Cataloging for a Major Marketplace
The client works with thousands of resellers around the globe, with a huge disparity of cataloging knowledge. The client wanted to ensure that the integrity of its catalog was maintained so that buyers were able to have an improved shopping experience by being able to quickly and easily find what they were looking for. Ultimately, this would also lead to the sellers having a positive selling experience. To accomplish this, it was critical that all items were cataloged properly and quickly. Due to the large volume of items and seasonal increases, they needed a partner that could supply knowledgeable, flexible staff to review the catalog daily.
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