Five Questions with DataWeave Co-Founder & CEO, Karthik Bettadapura

If you’ve been following our recent blog series on retail analytics, you’ve learned how just a single insight can dramatically improve marketing ROI.

In Part 1, The Correlation Between Conversion Rate and Shipping Times, we shared a case study about a client whose Amazon Advertising conversion rates inexplicably dipped at the beginning of the pandemic. Based on a hunch and data from our ecommerce intelligence partner, DataWeave, we discovered that the drop in performance was due to inflated estimated shipping times on non-essential goods. 

DataWeave was able to aggregate publicly available data so that the marketing team could reallocate the Amazon Advertising budget to only drive traffic to products estimated to arrive within a seven-day delivery window. Anything beyond seven days was paused. The team’s hypothesis paid off and in the week following the new strategy, conversion rates rose sharply again. 

The single insight that shipping times do correlate to ecommerce advertising success was the key to unlocking better performance. 

There’s probably a lot of unknown factors impacting all of your online and offline marketing programs. At Skai, we believe that the first era of digital advertising was fueled by campaign management best practices and the next era will be fueled by data and insights—data being the “raw materials” from which insights are mined. 

Where will marketers get this data? From partners such as DataWeave. 

Five Questions with DataWeave Co-Founder & CEO, Karthik Bettadapura

Yesterday, Skai announced a partnership with DataWeave to offer marketers greater visibility into brand performance relative to competition by monitoring brand share of voice, pricing, and assortment discoverability across their online distribution channels.

To better understand what this new partnership means for marketers, we spoke with Karthik Bettadapura, DataWeave’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Who is DataWeave and how do you do what you do?

DataWeave is an AI-powered SaaS platform that provides Competitive Intelligence as a Service to consumer brands and e-commerce businesses. We, therefore, enable them to compete profitably and accelerate their revenue growth. 

Our technology platform aggregates and analyzes public e-commerce data on a massive scale. This helps brands optimize their digital shelf for increased sales, as well as to protect their brand equity online. Over our near decade-long journey, we’ve developed a deep and unmatched expertise in empowering brands with accurate (95%+), actionable and timely insights on their presence on online marketplaces. 

We’ve had the opportunity to partner with myriad e-commerce businesses and brands globally like Adidas, Dorel, Sauder, Timex, QVC, Overstock, and many more. 

Why is this valuable to marketers?

The emergence of e-commerce brought with it a slew of benefits for brands. Access to a large base of shoppers and sellers, improved customer convenience, and an opportunity for greater brand visibility came in tow. However, it also posed new challenges – an increasing dependency on marketplaces, more competition, the proliferation of private label brands, and restricted access to customer data. 

In this environment, marketers have the unenviable task of driving more sales, growing market share, and protecting their brand. They need innovative solutions to compete for the shoppers’ mind and wallet share. Using DataWeave’s technology, brands can command a higher share of category and search listings, optimize their catalog content, boost their availability and analyze the brand perception – all to attain the goal of selling more on online marketplaces. 

To enable hyperlocal strategies, several of these insights can be delivered even at a ZIP level, which adds a unique tool to the marketer’s arsenal. 

Marketers have typically seen several benefits:

• Improved ROI on advertising and promotional activity
• Increased visibility of their products
• Higher conversions, driven by better product content
• Improved stock availability
• Cleaner sales channel through a reduction in MAP violations, counterfeits, and unauthorized merchants

What are some of the levers for brands to drive performance and discovery on online marketplaces?

Price: This is one of the most vital factors in boosting visibility and conversions. It’s therefore imperative that retailers and brands ensure they’re competitively priced.

Content: The quality of content and messaging has a direct impact on SEO (in marketplaces) and therefore traffic and conversions. As a result, attractive, informative, and optimized catalog content is vital to boosting discovery of a product. User-generated content such as product reviews is a rich source of information that lends a great deal of credibility to the product or brand. This can be utilized to deliver the right and most compelling messages across digital channels.

Digital Advertising: Online marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart have become essential advertising platforms for brands to compete on for the shopper’s attention. This is especially true in today’s world where shoppers are increasingly brand agnostic. Brands would do well to evaluate their organic visibility on these platforms on an ongoing basis and use advertising opportunities to strategically maintain and optimize their Share of Voice, resulting in higher traffic and conversions. 

Availability & delivery times: As more and more brands look to optimize their supply chain operations, availability and fast delivery times will be a serious contender in determining a brand’s rank. This is particularly relevant during the current COVID19 crisis, where supply chains are stressed across the board and consumers are witnessing reduced availability as well as protracted delivery times. 

Competitive insights: Across all of the levers mentioned above, timely and accurate insights on your competitors’ digital shelf, such as their pricing, content, advertising, availability, etc. would add another dimension to your decision-making, enabling brands to get and stay a cut above the rest. 

3P merchant ecosystem: For brands that rely on a network of 3P merchants, it’s important to ensure the health of this ecosystem, so that only well-reviewed/ vetted and highly ranked merchants are listed selling your products.  

A common thread in acting on these performance areas is the opportunity to extract actionable insights from digital shelf data of both their own products as well as their competitors’. 

Why should digital shelf insights matter to brands? How does a brand marketer leverage signals from digital shelf analytics?

Brands today have very little control over their performance on online marketplaces. Data is either limited, incomplete, or not actionable. 

With digital shelf data, a marketer can leverage signals such as the rank of the product, the replenishment rate, reviews, ratings, and more to predict the popularity and shelf velocity of their own products relative to their competitors. Having identified any gaps, they can look to improve their performance by optimizing the content, promotional messaging, availability, price, and other performance levers to drive more sales and gain a higher market share. 

How can digital shelf analytics solve some of the new challenges brands are facing due to the COVID-19 crisis?

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit businesses of all shapes and sizes hard. However, the resulting lockdown and health concerns have triggered an unprecedented surge in online shopping, predominantly for consumer essentials. 

As the economy slowly recovers, there is expected to be a residual shift towards shopping behavior online. As a result, retailers and brands are set to face renewed and increased competition to seize a share of the growing e-commerce pie. 

Consumers are increasingly brand-agnostic in their shopping behavior due to uncertainties in-stock availability and delivery times. Generic and unknown brands are entering the fray on online marketplaces as consumers open up to substitutes. 

In addition, there have been various reports of price gouging on marketplaces, which brands are monitoring and resolving regularly within their 3P merchant network. Given these challenges, digital shelf analytics can help brands manage their most pressing issues. For example, they can focus their supply chain restoration efforts toward regions and categories that are seeing severe shortages, track and take down unauthorized merchants, and sharpen their promotional campaigns to get more for fewer dollars.

Is your ecommerce advertising program powered by retail intelligence?

Learn more about how the combination of DataWeave’s retailer and competitive datasets with Skai’s marketing intelligence technology can increase the effectiveness of advertising on your online presence.

You can also schedule a brief demo to learn more about everything that Skai Ecommerce has to offer. Learn how leading brands and agencies leverage Skai’s advanced optimization, analytics & automation solutions to get started quickly, navigate new ad formats, and drive growth.

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