ABSTRACT

Ecommerce and Google search analytics for major FMCG brands

By
Samyak Jain

I am interning at MfilterIt as a Data Analysis Intern. The tenure of my internship is

18th March 2020 to 18th June 2020. I attended office for about a week after which
the lockdown took place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the
internship is completely online on a work from home basis.

I am being guided by Mr. Ankush Arora, Manager Pre-sales along with Ms.
Simran Pandey, Project Manager.

The internship started by understanding the company, their functioning and the
product. A detailed training session was given on analytics and the services offered
by the company. As a Data Analysis intern, my role in the internship was to
provide analysis on search data of Ecommerce and Google for FMCG brands to
give insights on the competitive landscape. Companies are moving towards data
driven decisions rather than gut based decisions and this helps them in correctly
positioning their product in the market.

For one month I was working for the present clients of the firm. This helped me in
understanding the working of the company and how the analysis is provided. After
successful completion of first month, I got the opportunity to work for the potential
clients which the company was trying to procure. Doing analysis and providing
recommendations to the present clients for relatively easy as the framework is
already in place, but doing the same thing for a new client is a challenging task and
a lot of research goes into place. At the start of any project, I was being provided
with the following information:

 Client and Competition brands,

 Platforms Covered
  Main Product.

The internship was divided into two parts where I spent out time in two different
departments.

The departments were as follows:

1) E-commerce Analytics :

We provide analysis on the performance of our client’s brand and

competition brands in the market on the following aspects:
 Brand Share
 Sponsored Listings
 Seller Analysis( Other vs Official)
 SKU ranges
 Pricing
 Discounting
 Revenue
 Stock Status
 Ratings

2) Search Ads Analytics

The following aspects are covered to do the analysis for a brand in Search
Ads

 Bidding Pattern Analysis

 Geo Analysis
 Average Ad Position
 Average Page position
 
 Ad Copy Text Analysis

Methods used:

1) Research: The project starts by researching about the client, products

offered to get an understanding of the brand
2) Data Collection: Data is collected by our own developed scanning tool.
3) Data Cleaning: Collected data goes through the process of cleaning where
we categorize the data according to the needs of the client and deal with
missing values.
4) Data Analysis and Visualization: Useful pivots are made on Power BI and
Excel which are presented in the form on Trend charts for better
visualization. Along with PPT’s, Power Dashboard is also provided to the
client for live updates.

Conclusion:

Month on Month analysis is provided to understand the trends in the market and
make a strategy accordingly. As a result, I was able to understand the marketing
strategies of different brands and take corrective measures accordingly. I gave
recommendations to the client based on the analysis which helped them increase
their ROI on marketing spends. I provided the client with strategies which would
increase their brand presence on different platforms. Apart from the client, I
provided some recommendations to our company to improve the process further
and some of it were implemented as well.

INTRODUCTION

About the company

mFilterIt is a global Fraud Detection & Prevention Company, providing neutral,

platform agnostic fraud detection solutions for brand and performance marketing

Since 2015, mFilterIt has provided Fraud Solutions to some of the top Mobile &
Web Advertisers, Mobile Handset OEMs and Telecom Operators. It is currently
the No. 1 fraud detection company in India & SE-Asia and expanding its services
across the globe.
It helps advertisers get a true picture on their traffic and helps them in taking
critical decisions related to their media spends such as identifying the appropriate
source for a campaign

The brand helps mobile advertisers save on their costs by eliminating fraud from
their performance-based marketing. It does fraud detection for all App
performance-based marketing campaigns such as:
 CPI( Cost Per Install)
 CPR( Cost Per Registration)
 CPT( Cost Per Transaction)
 Event/Retargeting
mFilterIt helps advertisers get a true picture on their traffic and helps them in
taking critical decisions related to their media spends such as identifying the
appropriate source for a campaign
Division introduction
In September 2019, the company started their consulting division by the name
mScanIt e-commerce analytics.
The aim of this division is to provide a unique solution to help brands access their
performance and take corrective measures which results in huge savings in
marketing budgets and increase in KPI’
Objective of the project

To help brands ascertain their performance on ecommerce platforms, which helps

them in their marketing, branding and product positioning in E-retail sector. It also
helps them in understanding the competitive landscape of their Brand presence,
Pricing, Discounting, Revenue, Stock availability, Rating etc

METHODOLOGY

This is an overview of the aspects we cover to get the analysis for a brand in E-
commerce space. We call it the “mScanit five pillar approach for a brand in E-
commerce space.
Aspects:

1. Discoverability
2. Availability
3. Visibility
4. Execution Compliance
5. Performance

Discoverability:

 Product Listings: This provides the client with a deep analysis of the
different products listed on various E-Commerce marketplaces, where we
can see ours as well as competitors brand share
 User Profile based Targeting: Studying targeting aspect on e-commerce
marketplaces using user profiles based on gender, age, purchasing history
etc. This helps the client to decide which customers to target, retargeting etc.
 Position & Page Analysis: Analysis of product positioning on different E-
Commerce pages. We analyze data up to the third page, where we show the
product positioning on each page in comparison with the competitors
 Pricing & Discount Analysis: Comparison of pricing for different E-
Commerce marketplaces and providing a deep dive on discounts offered by
different brands. This also helps us to decide whether to focus on price
sensitive customers as well as judge the customer loyalty.
 SKU Analysis: Analysis on the number of variants available for a particular
product on different E-Commerce marketplaces, which SKU is performing
well and which SKU should be expanded/ discontinued. This helps us
understand the consumer preferences towards different variants offered of a
product

Availability:

Stock analysis:
  In/Out of Stock analysis: Analysis on Stock availability on different E-
Commerce marketplaces w.r.t products listed and variants
 Buy Box Tracking: We track Stock status and perform inventory
forecasting to avoid losing Buy Box
 Pin Code wise stock Availability: This is the analysis of stock availability
drilled down to area pin code level
Seller Analysis
 Seller Analysis: Seller analysis on different E-Commerce marketplaces w.r.t
products listed, and revenue generated. This helps to understand weather the
products are mainly sold from the official stores or other sellers.
 Location Analysis: We provide Seller location analysis based on the
geographical availability.
 Rating & Reviews: This helps the clients to look at the Seller rating and
review analysis based on customer ratings and reviews.

Visibility:

 Flash sales and Promotions: We track Promotion Compliance and study

our competition to craft Flash Sales and Promotional offers to help the
clients tap into the target market.
 Media Campaigns: We track Media Campaign performance to achieve
visibility on Marketplace Homepage as well as on Category pages / Special
marketing pages.
 Sponsored Ads: We monitor Keyword/ Category/ Product/ Interest based
Sponsored Ads of Competitors to Plan your Ad Campaigns for effective Buy
Box gains.

Execution Compliance:

 Perfect Page: We enhance product descriptions and page details with high
definition videos, enhanced images, comparison charts and robust FAQ’s
etc.
 Banner Placement : We provide analysis of the rank of banner vis-à-vis
other brands displayed w.r.t placement(app/web), frequency and time.
 Counterfiet Detection: By tracking the listings of counterfeit products, we
efficiently detect, remove and prevent repeated infringements.
  Brand communication and Content Validation: We optimize product
pages for correct keywords, copy and images to improve visibility in organic
search results and enhance SEO.

Performance:

1. Rating & Reviews: We perform Rating & Reviews assessment to uncover

underperforming SKUs. By doing this, we are able to optimize performance
by taking action based on Customer Reviews.
2. Keywords Word Cloud: We generate insights from user generated
keywords to optimize product listing and enhance organic search results.
The Keywords are Provided to the client in the form of Word Clouds for
better visualization.
3. Revenue Estimate: We estimate Revenue to benchmark our Product
performance versus Competitors to prioritize search optimization efforts
required.

I also worked in the department responsible for the analysis of the Search Ads.
These are the aspects we cover to do the analysis for a brand in Search Ads:
 Bidding Pattern Analysis: We analyze the bidding behavior and strategies
of counterparts in terms of frequency, Time and Intensity.
 Geo Analysis: We provide analysis on biddings for various cities and
regions in order to deep dive into marketing strategies. This helps us
understand the regions of a country on which a particular brand is focusing.
 Average Ad Position: This helps us identify where the Ad for the brand
generally gets placed on a search page.
 Average Page Position: This helps us identify on which page the Ad gets
placed during AdWords campaign.
 Ad Copy Text Analysis: We provide detailed analysis of keywords used in
the ad copy of the ad to identify keywords/phrases mostly used by a brand.

PROCESS

The data analysis process consists of three main steps:

 Finding Keywords
  Data Collection
 Data Cleaning
 Data analysis and Visualization

Finding Keywords

The process starts by indentifying the keywords which are highly used by the
consumers on Google and Ecommerce platforms while searching for the product at
hand. This is done with the help of the Google Keyword Planner. A list of highly
competitive keywords is made which is shown in Figure 1. Keywords used on
Google are different from the ones that we use on E-commerce Platforms therefore
we have to choose the relevant keywords.

Data Collection

Data is collected by our own developed scanning tool for search results obtained
from these keywords. We usually collect data till 3rd page of every search result
since consumers do not go beyond that in their shopping process.

The data collection is an automated process which is mostly performed by the

technical department.

Data Cleaning

Data cleaning refers to the process of categorizing the data according to the client’s
requirements and dealing with missing values. This step is very essential for an
error free analysis.

Data collected is shown in Figure 2. While we receive information like pricing,

stock status, ratings etc, Categorization of the products and their brands have to be
done manually. By looking the description of every product, we divide it into 4
categories:

 Main Product: refers to the actual product

 Product Type: the category to which the product belongs
 Main Brand: refers to the name of the brand
 Brand Type: indicates whether it is client’ brand or competition brand
Initially, this process was performed on MS Excel, but the company developed
their own software for better data mapping.

The interface for the software is shown in Figure 3

Data Analysis and Visualization

After successful completion of the Data cleaning process, we move to the process
of making pivots on MS Excel.

Pivots are illustrated in Figure 4. For the client, It is hard to gain any insights from
these pivots, therefore we move to the next process of Data Visualization

Proper Data Visualization is very essential to understand the trends in the market.
Through trend charts, we are able to analyze how companies are changing their
product positioning strategies.

We can see how brands price their products and which price ranges consumer
prefers the most. We can also compare the discounts offered and the product sizes
preferred by the consumers.

Trend charts provided to the client is shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6

Review of Literature

The project was based on the concept of Search Analytics. To get a basic
understanding of the concept, following information from the respective articles
were referred to:

1) Benefits of Data Analytics in E-commerce business: Buying process of

consumer has changed significantly over time. Consumers search for promo
codes and look to trusted online sources for reviews before making their
purchase. With the help of Data Analytics, we can better understand the
online behavior and create data-rich profiles of different audience segments.
Data suggests that “66% of the products fail within the first two years”. This
can be improved by understanding the consumer behavior which will lead to
better product positioning. Data analytics allows us to rapidly change the
marketing strategies in response to market changes.
 2) (DO NOT DELETE)Benefits of Data Analytics in E-commerce business:
Buying process of consumer has changed significantly over time.
Consumers search for promo codes and look to trusted online sources for
reviews before making their purchase. With the help of Data Analytics, we
can better understand the online behavior and create data-rich profiles of
different audience segments. Data suggests that “66% of the products fail
within the first two years”. This can be improved by understanding the
consumer behavior which will lead to better product positioning. Data
analytics allows us to rapidly change the marketing strategies in response to
market changes.

Recommendations

These are some of the recommendations which I suggested to the company which
they implemented in the process

1) Sponsored Ad Analysis: We already provide sponsored listings analysis to

the client in which we analyze the share of each brand in Sponsored Ads. By
manually searching results on different keywords, I found that some of the
Sponsored Ads were not relevant. In many cases I found that the same
product was listed just below the sponsored product. This is the money
which can be better spent elsewhere. The company found this suggestion
useful and added it in the process.
2) Detect Counterfeit Products: There are many sellers online which sell
counterfeit products. Many products are sold in variants which are not
produced by the company. I suggested cross checking the listings on
platforms and the compare those with the listings on the company’s website.
This way we can detect counterfeit products and protect the client’s image.
3) Change of Software: Currently we use MS Excel for making the pivots.
Therefore for each project we have new data and hence new pivots. If we
use Power Bi instead of Excel, a lot of hard work can be saved. There is no
need to create new Pivots for every project. Just by changing the data source,
pivots will be updated automatically. This can save a lot of time. This
recommendation is still in testing.
 Conclusion

 I was impressed to see how quickly the brands adapt to the strategies
suggested by us. If a brand finds our suggestions and analysis useful, they
can change their whole marketing campaigns within a month which was
evident from the monthly trend charts.
 After performing the above mentioned analysis, I provided our clients with a
detailed assessment of the changing strategies of the competition brands and
take corrective measures for better performance and visibility on E-
commerce and Google platforms.
 By performing the visibility analysis, I was able to provide a unique solution
to the client which leads to increase in their ROI on Marketing spends. This
results in Huge Savings in Marketing Budgets and increase in KPIs.
 By performing the performance assessment, I was able to provide the clients
with a result oriented E-commerce strategy for superior performance.

References

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2019/01/04/heres-how-data-
and-analytics-can-benefit-e-commerce-business-owners/#444fbefc1460
 https://mfilterit.com/?
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