Digital shelf PDPs are a de facto extension of your brand’s website. Think about browsing in a store. You find a product on the shelf that’s interesting and you want to learn more about it. You search for the product on Amazon, and do all your product research right on the PDP: images, features, ratings, and reviews. It’s all right there, and it’s used everyday as a source of product truth for consumers. 

The Basics of Visual Optimization on the Digital Shelf

It’s not enough to make sure your own brand website is optimized—you have to do the same for the retailers like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and others. When it comes to ensuring image and content compliance to maximize value with omnichannel consistency, there’s a few things you can do:

• Create a source of truth for all images, titles, and PDP content. Check incoming data feeds against your PIM/DAM solution.
• With ecommerce, there’s no such thing as “set it and forget it.” Use ongoing monitoring to ensure consistency and quickly respond to market changes.
• In addition to your own product offering, keep an eye on your most formidable competitors’ visual approach and promotional strategy. 

The next level is to use that data to guide optimization of PDPs: 

• Analyze large volumes of visual data to understand what category-level and image-level trends exist, and then identify opportunities to make changes in visual content.
• Customer sentiment also provides a rich dataset to analyze and guide optimization. Mine product ratings and reviews to inform positioning, visual emphasis, and the highlighting of popular features and customer uses. These insights can then be spun into new content, such as lifestyle shots, to ensure that you’re showing the product in ways that resonate with consumers. 
• Media coding, or the categorization and optimization of types and volume of carousel content, also provides an opportunity to further optimize PDPs. Use categories (i.e., “client testimonial video” or “front of package”) to determine what boxes are being checked by top search performers.

5 Steps to Fix Falling Traffic and Conversions on PDPs 

Let’s say you’ve identified pages that suffer from falling traffic. Then what? 

• Begin by “walking the aisles.” This is something you should be doing daily, either manually or through digital shelf monitoring solutions.
• Focus on visual content and measuring how impactful your hero images are at enticing attention and clicks versus your competitors—and then attempt to understand why.
• Next, optimize product copy to ensure the right keywords are included for key search terms.
• Once you’ve optimized the content on the PDP, evaluate the strength of your brand store.  A well-designed brand store helps link shoppers to the full catalog and keeps shopping options within the same brand. Without a brand store, the byline will link to a general search, which can include competitor products.  
• Lastly, consider paid support for your top brands and products, which can help spin your optimized products above the fold on the search results page.   

How to Implement Visual Optimization at Scale

Optimizing PDP performance at scale requires help in the form of automation. Data automation is critical to ensuring conversion-driving experiences across the shelf. Follow this five-step process for making the most of your PDPs across brands and experiences: 

• Identify your key brands. Focus on the brands or segments of your catalog that will have maximum impact on your bottom line or are of strategic importance to your business. 
• Automate data collection. You have access to numerous sources of data—internal reports, retailer reports like Vendor Central, and data you acquire through data scraping, to name a few. The more you can automate and organize the collection of all those data sources, the easier it will be to draw tangible insights from it. 
• Focus on SKUs. Once you’ve gathered the correct data sources, you can narrow your focus on key SKUs to understand which listings are losing ground to competitors, and then focus on the right levers to optimize those pages.
• Flight changes and enact quick wins to improve performance. Review category or competitor trends to make more impactful long-term optimizations. 
• Monitor performance on an ongoing basis. Create dashboards and alerts for ongoing performance monitoring and visual optimization. 

Not only will completing the above processes have an impact on the conversion and sales of individual SKUs, but it could also help strengthen your overall brand perception and sales through all your various retail channels. 

Want to learn more about image optimization on the digital shelf? Contact Vizit for a demo today.