Competitive Analysis On Amazon Takes A Turn


Competitive Analysis On Amazon Takes A Turn




by  @lauriesullivan, December 13, 2019

Developers at Gradient.io — an intelligent insights platform that tracks sales on Amazon — made changes to its technology that now allow marketers selling on Amazon to track not only the performance of their brands, but competitors too.


The company — which set out to “expose” tons of insights from data — now tracks more than 85 million products sold on Amazon. Bobby Figueroa, former head of global operations for Amazon Advertising and founder of Gradient.io, says that in the past people could request their own score, but it was not a connected experience.


“There are a lot of similarities to performance marketing with this update,” he says, using a SEO and SEM analogy. “To gain visibility in an ecommerce platform, you rely on search technology. It’s the main way to find products online.”


Now the platform seems similar to the processes required for optimizing content in a search engine, he said, because features in the technology now enable any brand on-demand to gain access to their Gradient score — not only for their brands, but the names of competitors. Rather than going to the platform to check the data, brand managers using Gradient.io will send an email with the latest data and trends for any company requested.


Managing campaigns on an ecommerce platform is different, he says. The process is driven by keywords and auctions, similar to a search engine, but the variables taken into consideration are broader — such as logistics, price and inventory levels.


Historically, Gradient.io would provide the brand with scores, only noting the highest comparative score — and the company would not reveal the brand name, but now it does.


With the latest release, Gradient.io allows anyone to easily search from more than 200,000 brands it tracks in its system to learn how a brand performs on Amazon and how it compares to their competition. 


The changes came about after analyzing brands and looking at their Gradient Score and how their sales rank in Amazon. The company found that in 90% of the more than 15,000 categories tracked on Amazon, increases in the Gradient Score correlated to an increase in sales rank.


In other words, Gradient Score was able to successfully predict the future sales of brands. 


Figueroa tested his thesis that a score could increase sales during Black Friday. In the vitamin category, Flintstones improved its overall Gradient Score from 533 to 600 in 12 days, rising from rank 59 to 34 in the category.


In the Video Games category, 2K Games improved its overall Gradient Score from 469 to 518. It saw its ranking in the category rise from 35 to 17 during the same period.


The long-term strategy, Figueroa says, is to develop tools that build product positioning and customer responses in to the score. Today the performance analytics platform only works with Amazon, but the hope is to expand into supporting other retailers.  

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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