Understanding how your consumers shop is essential. As we ease into 2021, retailers are accelerating their digital strategies and keeping their finger on the pulse of what customers want and need.

In this article, we’ll cover how businesses can utilise the data they have and use past trends to predict future ones in order to track consumer behaviour. And once businesses have done that, they can use the right platform — like Upp — to uncover their product performance data (and therefore better understand customer spend) and provide strategic insights to help achieve their goals.

Look at past buying patterns

The outstanding buying pattern that emerged in 2020 was, unsurprisingly, a growth in online shopping. Retail websites generated almost 22 billion global visits in June 2020, which was up nearly 6 billion from January 2020. Online shopping is only set to increase over the coming years with a forecasted growth rate of 34.5% by 2023.

Different industries have experienced specific online trends and fluctuations. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, certain product types have significantly increased in online retail order volumes — household hardware has rocketed by 212%, furniture spiked to 17% and consumer electronics rose by 9%. In April 2020, internet food sales increased by 83.2% in comparison to the same month a year earlier, and online worldwide apparel sales also rose almost £3 million across the year.

Analysing buying patterns and 2020 sales data in your specific industry will allow you to accurately predict how your consumers will spend in the future — crucial to business success looking forward to 2021. Anticipating customer needs makes room for you to adjust your Google Shopping campaigns accordingly.

Utilise the data you have

Online shopping has given retailers the gift of rich and readily available product performance data. Success comes down to one main thing: using it with the right objectives in mind.

The right data can be difficult to get your hands on and hard to interpret. It’s crucial to note that Google Shopping only gives you historic data, so it’s hard to predict future trends.

A platform like Upp can provide this insight and ultimately make a real improvement in your customer targeting and business goals. It will be pivotal in deducing data quickly and efficiently to put you on the right track for overall business growth.

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How Upp can help utilise your data:

Understand where your business is struggling as well as thriving:

Your online store may have best sellers but you still have 0 visibility on Google Shopping. Upp exposes these discrepancies and realigns your campaigns to ensure they get visibility on Google Shopping and achieve maximum growth as a result.

Ensures every SKU reaches optimum performance:

Seeing your product performance data at SKU level can help you see how each product is performing and how this can be adjusted. For example, these insights can tell you if a product is selling well, Upp will tweak that campaign to ensure it reaches optimum performance. This can also help prevent ad spend being wasted, and ensure you’re getting a great ROI.

Become more efficient:

Is your company spending too much time managing campaigns? A platform like Upp will automate your daily tasks, like bidding and automating campaign structures, to create a more productive workflow. This will also help retailers gain strategic control over campaigns, and ensures they get everything out of them.

Be where your customers are

Successful online retail is all about being on the right channels. To put it bluntly, there’s no point spending on marketing to your customers if they aren’t there. Without investing in a platform like Upp, though, that’s easier said than done.

How Upp can help target customers:

Uncover trending products:

With customers online more, it’s no surprise that ad spend on Google Shopping has increased by 38% compared to 2019. Upp uncovers performance data around trends and product demand, allowing retailers to accelerate growth and increase profitability.

Reach all potential customers:

If Upp sees a product performing well on a retailer’s online store but not Google Shopping, the campaign will be automatically adjusted to ensure it gets the visibility it needs. This means ad spend is being utilised efficiently and helps retailers reach even more customers.

Automatically track consumer behaviour for the best results

Grasping a more detailed picture of your consumers’ previous buying habits is critical to successfully appealing to them in 2021. This is especially important with increasing online retail competition that’s likely to reach just below £100 billion in the UK in 2020 across various shopping streams.

Understanding past buying patterns, utilising the data you have access to and ensuring that you are present on the right online platforms are all crucial to business success in 2021. Managing these key areas manually, however, will undoubtedly slow your team down and limit your performance.

That’s why it’s key that you don’t pass up the opportunity to invest in a transformative platform like Upp, which will help you reach the success you’re capable of achieving this upcoming year.