Discoverability: Are your games visible to shoppers? – eebz

You could be missing out on sales because consumers can’t find your products. Peter Laughton, CEO of eebz, explains why discoverability remains a key issue, and what good PRM tools can do to help…

 

For any sales team – in games and beyond – there are three key areas of importance when it comes to ecommerce: Awareness, Discoverability and Conversion/Add To Basket.

Over the past two decades in games and ecommerce, much time has been spent on Awareness and Conversion. But, although ‘Discoverability’ has become a huge buzz word, many sales efforts are let down by not enough focus on this area.

And that’s crazy. You can spend all the money you like on marketing campaigns and community outreach, but if consumers can’t find the game you’re promoting, that’s potential sales needlessly lost.

Discoverability is even more important when you consider that non-specialist retailers like Very are growing their market share in games. Search for ‘GRID’ on the Very.co.uk site and see how many barbecue accessories come up before you find the Codemasters racing title.

But even on more specialist ecommerce sites, discoverability can still be an issue. Our research here at eebz has revealed that on the PlayStation Store, around 10 percent of all titles can’t be found using obvious search terms.

So, discoverability is a serious issue for all sales and marketing teams, which is why ensuring accuracy on your retailer product pages and product data is key to success in this area.

Ultimately, for your game to be discoverable you need to ensure it’s displayed correctly on the digital shelf, with consistent and compelling content to drive consumer conversions from search engines like Google (and, indeed, Google Shopping).

There are several considerations here. Does your game have the right name in the store? Does your game have the right wording on its product listing page to make sure it stands out? Is it in the right category? Does it show via deep links in Google? Does it feature in ‘Also Recommended’ panels? Does the content need to change depending on territory?

Luckily there are Product Relationship Management (PRM) tools available that enable you to monitor the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) of your games, which in turn helps you optimise these factors and more to create the perfect listing for each retailer in each country in which your game is available.These tools will tell you where your product appears in store search results for each retailer in real time, which is immediately actionable intelligence. For example, you might be ranking #1 on Amazon across Europe, but in Portugal your game might be #20 on Worten.

You can then make the necessary corrections right away, at scale. At eebz, we currently track over 1,000 retailers and we’re constantly adding more – our aim is to offer data across 1,500 by the end of 2021.

Realistically, it would be almost impossible for your internal sales and marketing teams to spend time manually keeping track of product listings across that many sites.

And, having the right tools means you can begin to benchmark discoverability across territories. Northern Europe vs Southern Europe, all of Europe vs North America. Or even compare your games with those of your competitors to ensure the best store rankings and optimised discoverability.

Of course, when it comes to digital retail, the single biggest barrier to discoverability of your game is if it goes out of stock (OOS).

Google SERP and Google Shopping are the store entry points for most consumers, but being OOS for one day can ruin your product SERP for weeks.

Consider this: 60% of online buyers complete their purchases from a saved basket more than one day after first visiting a site – on most ecommerce systems OOS removes products from the basket. Permanently.

Left unchecked, someone else will steal that ‘buy’ box – so make sure you can move faster than the Google Bot and save the sale.

In the next issue of MCV/DEVELOP we will be looking at how Pricing and Promotion Monitoring ahead of, and during, major events like Black Friday can increase your sales efficiency.

eebz is the world’s premier product relationship management system that integrates bricks and mortar, e-commerce and digital channels on an equal footing.To find out more, visit www.eebz.com, email info@eebz.com or call 020 3886 0265