Impact of text tagging on sales – Right-on 3 months case study

The impact of text tagging on sales for Right-on was 101% 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.

INTRODUCTION

Good user experience in ecommerce relies heavily on the ability of the customers to find what they are looking for, easily and quickly. Basic search can only get you so far, and most of the time users don’t really know exactly what they are looking for, so the search is even less helpful. Site navigation allows customers to slice through a large number of products, and narrow them down to a more relevant and manageable amount. Refining the results by products’ attributes and values is what allows customers to quickly find the products they are interested in. 

Right-on is a major Japanese fashion chain, with over 400 stores around Japan. Right-on conducts its online sales through 2 main channels - its branded  online site and Rakuten marketplace. Last year, Right-on asked for LIsuto’s assistance to improve the product findability on Rakuten by increasing the navigational product tagging. The expectation was that such  improvement will lead to the increase in company’s KPIs - page views, sales and unique users acquisition and overall improvement of the user experience.

In order to validate the impact of text tagging on sales and other KPIs, Lisuto conducted a case study over a period of three months – beginning in the month prior to tagging of Right-on’s products with Xtag, and two months after tagging has been done on Rakuten. 

The results of the case study show how navigational tagging significantly improves products’ performance. Throughout the entire test period tagged products consistently and significantly  performed much better compared to untagged products in all the key metrics we tested: sales, page access numbers and the number of new visitors.

METHODOLOGY

The main objective of this case study was to monitor and analyze how tagging affects sales, page access numbers and the number of unique visitors. In this scope, Right-on provided Lisuto with the top 1,000 best performing products throughout the entire test period, which contained both tagged products and untagged products. The test period began in April 2020 and ended in June 2020. April ‒ one month before any product has been tagged  ‒ served as a benchmark for later months. 

THE STUDY

Sales

Total Sales

We begin with total sales, and from the start we get a clear picture of which type of product has an advantage. In May, the first month after tagging the products, tagged products enjoyed a more than 20% increase in sales, relative to April. Untagged products, however, suffered a decrease of 12.5% in sales at the same time.

June made the picture even clearer. While untagged products experienced a whopping drop in sales numbers, at the same month tagged products’ sales numbers increased by more than 90%. It is hard to get more clear cut results as to who performs better.   

Page Views

Page Views

The page access numbers again show how significant the advantage tagged products have over untagged products. In the first month of the test, after tagging the products, tagged products enjoyed an increase of more than 20% in page access, compared to the base month, while untagged products decreased by the same percentage. 

The trend carried over to June, when tagged products showed a massive increase in sales, almost doubling their numbers from April. By contrast, at the same month, untagged products dropped even lower than the month before, losing more than 45% of the sales they had in April.

Unique users

Unique users

The data for unique visitors visiting the pages not only reflects the advantage of tagged products over untagged one, but also keeps in line with the numbers for sales and page access. We can see that in May, tagged products took on 22% more unique visitors than the month before. In the same month, untagged products’ unique visitors numbers dropped by more than 17%.

As before, June was very good for tagged products, and very bad for untagged ones. Tagged products again nearly doubled their unique visitors numbers from April, while untagged products’s numbers plummeted by more than 40%. 

CONCLUSIONS

As mentioned above, tagging products with relevant attributes and values makes it much easier to be found by customers. It is therefore only logical to assume that tagging products will increase sales, page access and unique visitors numbers. The results of this case study bear this assumption by demonstrating how products that were tagged by Xtag significantly outperformed untagged products during the test period, in all three metrics we tested: sales, page access numbers and the number of new visitors. 

With such statistically significant results, which correspond to results of other case studies we have conducted like Kitamura camera, Bic camera, Jwell and more, the conclusion is that impact of text tagging on sales and other KPIs is very high. For sellers the meaning is very simple - make this highly ROI positive investment before you consider anything else.