Impact of data tagging on sales – Naturum 3 months case study

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The impact of data tagging on sales for Naturum was 50.8% more sales for tagged items compared to the non tagged items at the same period of time. Similar positive gap observed in page views and unique users KPIs.

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COMPANY OVERVIEW

Naturum Co., Ltd. is one of Japan’s leading online retailers of outdoor goods. The company sells tens of thousands of outdoors items, from apparel to fishing lures to tents and sleeping bags. Naturum engages with its customers both through its own branded website, but mainly through Rakuten marketplace. 

THE PROBLEM

After years operating in Rakuten, Naturum sought to increase its growth in several KPI’s, mainely sales, page views and unique users acquisition. For that purpose, Naturum turned to Lisuto to bolster its navigational product tagging, thereby improving the product findability on Rakuten. The assumption was that increased tagging will lead to improvement in the important KPI’s and overall user experience. 

THE SOLUTION

To corroborate the assumption, and to measure the effects of text tagging, Lisuto cooperated with Natrum to conduct a case study. The study took place over a period of three months, beginning in February 2021, before any tagging has been done, and which served as the benchmark for later months. 

The case study results corroborate the assumption, and demonstrated that tagging indeed improves product performance. Tagged products consistently did better than untagged products through each month of the test period, in all the KPI’s we examined. 

METHODOLOGY

Over the three months study period, February served as the benchmark for March and April, since no products were tagged before or during February. Only the top 1,000 most viewed products during the test period were included in the study. Lisuto used the top 1,000 most viewed untagged products as a control group for the test period.

THE RESULTS

Sales

From the get-go, tagged products demonstrate their advantage over untagged products. While March has been a great month for both types of products, compared to February, tagged products did significantly better, seeing a rise of 110% in sales, compared to only 46% increase in sales of untagged products.

April was also a good month for both. But once again, tagged products did much better than untagged products, experiencing a 92% increase in sales to untagged products’ 54% increase. 

On average, we can see that during the test period, tagged products performed 50% better than untagged products in terms of sales.   

Page Views

Tagged products continued to outperform untagged products in terms of page views as well. As we can see in the table above, in March, tagged products improved their page views from February by 44%, as opposed to only a 23% improvement by untagged product. 

April saw the difference between the two types of products diminish a little, but tagged products still maintained the lead comfortably, enjoying a 26.5% increase in page views, compared to only 14% by untagged products. 

In terms of page views, on average, tagged products did 16.5% better than untagged products during the test period. 

Unique Users

Finally, the numbers for unique users maintain the trend established above - that is the superiority of tagged products over untagged products. Tagged products finished March with an increase of 42% in unique users numbers, compared to the month before. At the same time, untagged products also saw an increase in unique users, but only 23%.

April was less strong than March, but tagged products still managed to show a 25.5% uptick in its unique users numbers, compared to only 13% rise in untagged products’ numbers. 

On average, during the test period, tagged products performed 15.5% better than untagged products in terms of unique users.   

CONCLUSIONS

Since the purpose of product tagging is to make products easier to find, it is really no mystery why it also contributes to improved sales, more page views and more unique users. If customers can easily find what they are looking for, it increases the chances of them buying it. This case study fully corroborates this assumption by showing the impact of data tagging on sales, demonstrating how tagged products did significantly better than untagged products, throughout the test period, and across all metrics we examined. 

It is hard to argue with such statistical data, further supported by other case studies, such as Right-on, Xebio and Kitamura camera and others. They all indicate that text tagging improves performances significantly. For sellers, it is the soundest investment they could do right now.