Follow along as Pete McCarthy and Susan Ruszala take you beyond “what is Marketing Insights…” to how it can direct your marketing effort’s on your most impactful titles. The first few minutes illustrate our morning coffee routine, and the later sections expand into the data and features that make Marketing Insights a powerful tool.
Full transcription is below:
Susan:
I have good morning up here on the slide not because it's morning, although it is for some of us, but in-kind service to this idea of a morning coffee scroll. What I want to do is take you through the entire Marketing Insights dashboard first and show you the whole scope. And then we'll dive into some of the individual reports and data points and use cases that we're seeing from the publishers using the tool.
From a navigational standpoint, Marketing Insights is accessed as a tab within Ingram's iQ. You can see at the top here. There are lots of different ways to slice and dice the information that is... Or the titles that are being surfaced in Marketing Insights. You can search on an individual title. You can see all of your titles. You can filter in lots of different ways.
Susan:
We have publishers who have their entire dashboard filtered by imprint, for example, or by format or by a pub date range. And we'll talk more about the filtering on individual reports as well.
You can see that it's possible to toggle between the UK and the US here, so you can have tracking in one or two geographic markets, and I think more markets to come as well, but it's very easy to move between the two markets and see how well you're optimized in either or both.
At the top of the dashboard, we have some key reports that loosely map to the marketing funnel. As we move down the dashboard, so as we're scrolling, we have our coffee in hand, we're looking for how the day's going to go, we see big movers. What's going on from yesterday to today in terms of consumer demand and which titles already have some interest from a demand perspective.
Susan:
And we'll dive into a few of these as we go along with the demo. As we continue to scroll down the dashboard, we see that we do a little bit of issue reporting. On the left-hand side, we're looking at titles that are launching in the next 90 days and how well their metadata is optimized for conversion.
On the right-hand side, we're starting to look at availability the way that Amazon shows it to the consumer. And then at the very bottom of the dashboard, we're looking at what's going on with the buy box. What's the pattern of loss of the buy box? How is that impacting my entire list? And how am I contextualizing that from a 30- or 60-day outlook or perspective?
And that's the entire scope of your morning coffee scroll. We have some key reports, we have some big movers, we have some issue reporting, we have some buy box reporting.
Susan:
You can also dive into an individual title report, and we'll click in and show you that whole dashboard as well. But I want to give you a sense that this is a lightweight tool. This is a tool where the pattern of usage is you're coming in, you're looking for opportunities, you're investigating, and then you're ignoring a lot of this information and you're going somewhere else to do something, right?
Susan:
"This is a great promotional opportunity; I need to get my marketing or publicity team on it. This is a big error. I need to make sure that Amazon corrects this right away." That's the pattern of usage that we see.
I want to go back up to the very top of the dashboard now. You remember that I said there are some key reports here that kind of loosely map to the marketing funnel. I want to talk a little bit about those. A lot of our publishers start with the metadata opportunities report and this makes a lot of sense.
Metadata is an area that's within the publisher's control. We know that improving metadata is always going to improve conversion when consumers land on your product detail page. But I really like the way that Marketing Insights handles metadata. If we click, these are your top opportunities here on the dashboard, but I'm going to go ahead and click on this full report up here and show you what that looks like.
Susan:
A lot of the publishers that we talk with talk about metadata optimization as a project. "We're doing a backlist optimization project, or we need to get through this number of titles and update the metadata." I don't really like to think about it that way. I like to think about the list as this living, breathing entity.
And I really want to update the metadata where it matters the most, so where my gaps in metadata intersect with consumer demand. And that's exactly what Marketing Insights is surfacing. We're saying, "Hey, of all of your titles, these are the ones that you want to update because you aren't going to be able to get to many titles today. You might as well update the ones where the impact is going to be the highest." And that's what this report is showing.
If we look at the column headers on the top here, you can see that this is a narrow range of metadata elements that directly impact the consumer's likelihood to press the buy button.
Susan:
Green is good. Yellow is a warning. Red is an issue that we want you to look at, and Pete's going to talk a little bit about what those specific fields look like when we click through to an individual title.
Before we do that, I want to just make a quick note about individual reports in Marketing Insights in general. Everything that you're seeing here can be downloaded as Excel or CSV. Really powerful, right?
Susan:
To be able to come in and just run a metadata report and send it out to someone to your editorial team to match it up against sales information, for example. Every report that we'll show you today can be exported. Every report can also be filtered.
You can filter by author, for example, if you want to look and optimize an author's entire body of work. You can search on a list of titles. I'm planning on reprinting these titles, and I just want to check their metadata before I do that. Let me go ahead and run that specific report.
There are great ways to filter your entire dashboard to get at segments of your list or to focus to filter an individual report to get at segments of your list. I want to go ahead and click on an individual title here and let Pete talk with you a little bit about what the individual title view looks like in Marketing Insights.
Pete:
Sure. Thanks Susan. That was a nice sort of summation of the list view, and the quick aspect of things, the ability to eyeball things, see major opportunities, see gaps, see problems that you need to jump on right away.
Once you dive into the title level view, a couple of things happen. The first thing that happens is we fire a bunch of insights and actions at you. These are sort of facts about this title at this time, that we know from studies are germane to discovery and conversion.
So, think important things to know about The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, for example, at this time. Some of those have to do with things that are happening out there in the marketplace, opportunities. Boy, this book's really doing great in its category right now, you might want to target more people who like this category.
Pete:
Business leadership books, or this book is popular on Goodreads, or this authors Wikipedia page is spiking, like this author is very popular right now. You might want to let the author know and do something, say something about this book because it's popping right now.
We also talk about warnings. You can see with the Colorado History, but below there, there are some category problems. Like we're seeing some things that just don't usually happen with books where it might be number five in a certain category and number 378 in another and 10,000 in another. That's a rare scenario and it means that the book is not in all the right categories, or we're only seeing one category and we think there's a chance to add two more and you'll be more discoverable.
Pete:
We also talk about issues and issues are things that we know cause friction in the funnel. In other words, people are going to get there. They're going to see a book description that's let's say 35 words long. It's not ample. They can't make a decision. They don't buy. These are sort of conversion killers.
And what we see a lot of publishers doing is using this insights and actions board to just say, "Here's the things I need to focus on in this title. If I do a little tidying and a little bit of advertising, a little bit of marketing, a little bit of organic marketing. I include it in an email. I'm going to grow sales on this title."
That's what you'll first see. After that, it's a lot of data. we're going to show you yesterday on Amazon and longitudinally over time what's happening with this book on Amazon.
Pete:
The list price, Amazon's price to the consumer, whether it was a third party who actually had the buy box at a given moment the day before, right next to sales rank. You can see what Amazon's doing with pricing and how that's affecting your overall sales rank and how your own activities are affecting it, right?
If you're doing things, you can see spikes happening and you can see them faster than you can see them in other tools. We think that speed and that agility is important. Still a lot of data packed into very short amount of time. Well, amount of space, rather, so to save you time.
One thing is finding growth patterns. I was talking about things you did, and, or things that happened. Here's a great example. This is a national title.
Pete:
This is a publisher who's doing some price dropping. You can see where they dropped the price on this book twice. January 24th and July 10th. There are those price drops. And then you can see what happened with their sales rank and what they were able to do is achieve a new baseline.
When Susan was talking about spotting patterns, this is what Marketing Insights really helps you to do. Helps you spots gaps. It also helps you spot the things that you do that work and that establish new baselines.
And this title has remained up there in the top, I'd say, 60,000, since the publisher did this. And it's several months later. That's the idea. What combinations work best? What can we replicate and keep doing? And again, as a time-saver, to aid discovery and conversion.
Pete:
Getting specific, what kinds of data do you see? Susan mentioned keywords before, and we're finding publishers are having a field day with this module on the titles. What do keywords mean in Marketing Insights?
This is the actual dashboard for Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Marketing Insights makes some keyword suggestions. You can see those down the left side there. We've highlighted dysfunctional teams because it is a great fit for this book, but these keywords can be used in your creative. They can be used in your descriptive copy. They could be used in your off-page keywords for Amazon.
That's where we mostly see publishers taking advantage of them. But you can see warehouse management books, management science, executive team building. Marketing Insights is saying to this publisher, "This book’s about a whole lot of different things."
Pete:
You want to construct your keywords wisely. To do so, you need a little bit more data than, "Are these keywords relevant to the book?" You need to understand what the consumers are doing, right? We've included our Google search volume, so it's average monthly searches. The cost per click, if you were to advertise, and that's mostly for the advertising use case, but if you don't have the advertising use case, it at least gives you a sense of the kind of competition for those words.
And then the actual competition. Is it high, medium, or low? Can you win referred to a given keyword? We think dysfunctional teams at medium with Google volume of a thousand average monthly searches, an Amazon volume up over a thousand monthly searches. Amazon is higher in search volume for that phrase, "dysfunctional teams," than is Google, which is quite rare.
Pete:
That seems like a winner for this book. This is how a user is using Marketing Insights to gain some keywords that she can use when she's going to market this book and that might be by targeted advertising. It might be by adding off-page keywords.
In this case, we did some looking and, in fact, right now, Five Dysfunctions is the number one organic result. You can see it down there boxed in blue. There are two paid results above it. This is an instance where this may be doing the trick. Publisher may want to experiment with doing a little bit of paid around dysfunctional teams to see if they can knock those others out, but they're doing a good job.
And it's the kind of information that Marketing Insights gives you. And it gives it to you right there very quickly. And I should say those keywords are downloadable. You can upload them. A lot of what's happening within Marketing Insights is downloading, uploading, et cetera.
Susan:
While you're on that screen, we have a couple of questions. Can you just talk about where we generate the keyword suggestions from?
Pete:
Oh yeah, sure. I'll try to be quick about it. Consumer reviews of this book, of comparable books, consumer comparable books and other books that they look at and buy, so very similar books.
We then pull statistically significant phrases out of there and then we bump that up against searches that we know occur based on if you think about auto prompts within Amazon and Google environment, so if you start to type very slowly, D-Y-S-F, eventually you get to, "Dysfunctional Teams." That's actually a search that people do. That’s what we're trying to give to you.
Terms that matter in consumer semantics that get searched in Amazon and Google. That's how it works. There's more to it than that, but that's how it works if that makes sense.
Pete:
It doesn't work by reading the insides of the book, because you wouldn't get management science, management books that way, you know. It works by listening to the consumer. Little more data.
We give you an abundance of data. Review activity at Amazon over time. You can see how you're doing with the number of reviews and the star ratings. Same thing for Goodreads and we give you a lot more data for Goodreads too. We want to spare you the data dive today, but Facebook activity links to that Amazon page. A lot of times, that's Amazon doing advertising on your behalf, and you don't even know it.
Pete:
They may be remarketing to people who looked at your book, for example, and doing that within the Facebook environment and then some author data, which is good to know, right?
Because a lot of times the lead brand is the author. Sometimes the book, sometimes it's a character, but a lot of times it's the author. And so, we look at Goodreads. We look at Amazon, and we look at Wikipedia. Those are three tells, they're sort of signals, as to consumer interest in this author at this time. So that's data you could expect to see at the title level.
Susan:
Okay. where are we so far? We looked at the entire scope of the dashboard. We clicked through to the metadata opportunities report. Talked a little bit about that specific report. It's where a lot of publishers start. We then looked at an individual title view, and Pete showed you all the data that's available at the individual title level. Some of our publishers spend a lot of time on individual titles. Some of them spend a lot of time in their reports and looking for patterns. Both use cases are legitimate.
I want to go back to the overall dashboard and talk about a few of the reports that we didn't get a chance to cover so far. If you'll remember, we looked at the big mover section or I mentioned the big mover section. What's going on from yesterday to today in terms of consumer demand and the titles that have momentum.
Susan:
Pete and I like to talk about this (Big Movers Report) as which titles already have wind in their sails. Those are the ones that you want to market. And if you know that that's happening and you have that agility and efficiency that we know is needed, you can then keep that momentum going.We look at a couple of different things here, everything from where's your consumer price dropping so which titles is Amazon merchandising for you?
We look at Goodreads activity for some types of publishers, Goodreads... Many types of publishers, Goodreads is an important way to gauge demand for a title, especially across the back list as titles kind of wax and wane in popularity.
Two reports that I really want to mention here, we look at Wikipedia page views. We know that... Why do we do that? We know that there's a correlation between Wikipedia page views for the author and demand for the title.
Susan:
And that makes sense to me, right? Interest in the person equals interest in the product. If your authors have notoriety or popularity on their own, especially outside of a particular title.
Like for example, for nonfiction authors, if your author is presenting at a conference where they're an expert in their field, or even for trade publishers, if they do a fan event or they're publishing something in another medium. You might see their Wikipedia page view spike. This is a really good bellwether tool so that you can make sure that you're capitalizing on that interest in the author and that you're aware that this is happening.
The other report that we see being really useful in this section for publishers is the sales rank report. And I want to go ahead and click on this one and show you the top 20 jumpers here.
Susan:
This is a report that we see frequently being emailed around in the morning, you know, "Hey, is there anything here that's interesting?" What we're looking at are a really big single day jump in rank from across your entire list in terms of percentage.
Why are we doing that? We're doing that because sometimes you're causing those rank change. You might be doing a price promotion. You might be marketing that title. You want to see how well it's going, right? Do I want to double down? Do I want to pull back on that campaign?
A lot of times though, you're not causing that rank change. Your title is being found as a lookalike title from a more popular author that's being marketed, or there's some publicity for that title that you may not know was happening.
Susan:
If you think about your title list as like this vast sea of pots that are always boiling, which ones are boiling over, and what do I want to do about it? At the very minimum, you want to look at that product page and how well it's optimized.
Susan:
If increased traffic is coming to your title, you want to make sure that title is converting at the highest possible rate. You might want to take it even further. You might want to touch the keywords, do some Amazon advertising, pop that title in the carousel on your website, have the author tweet about it. Whatever levers are at your disposal, this is a way that you can kind of flex your marketing muscle quickly and to maximum benefit, right? Because these are the titles that are likely to benefit from that type of attention.
Susan:
Okay, so I want to go back to the dashboard here and I want to keep moving down and talk a little bit about operational efficiency and the kind of information that surface in Marketing Insights.
We're back to the main dashboard. We're still having our morning coffee. We scroll down to the issue section. On the left-hand side, we're looking at titles that are publishing in the next 90 days and how well their metadata is optimized for conversion.
This is the same report as the metadata opportunities report, but just for pre-publication titles. we know that a title that does well at the onset is likely to have a higher average baseline overall. We want to make sure that your titles are optimized as well as they can be before they go on sale. Sometimes you'll have no titles here. That's great. That's the ideal situation, right?
Susan:
On the right-hand side, you'll see this Check Availability Report. And this is really looking at availability, the way that Amazon shows it to the consumer and a couple of different use cases here for this report.
We have publishers who love the speed and the efficiency of this report in intercepting errors, or kind of an out of syncness between what Amazon is telling consumers and their actual staff position.
We have publishers who are coming in here every single day, and they say, "This is the fastest way for me to see, 'Hey, Alaska's Mushrooms, three left in stock. I know Amazon place an order for that title, I need to do something about that.'" Or the opposite way. There's only 11 left in stock of this title on American theater. I know we're promoting this title or it's a key title for us, or this is a key selling season for that title.
Susan:
I want to go ahead and make sure that I get more inventory into the supply chain. On an individual title basis, this is a helpful speedy report efficiency. This is a really a useful report as well from a pattern spotting perspective. Being able to, for example, look across your entire list and say, "Why is it that some of my titles are always low stock? Is there something about the way that I'm supplying inventory or getting inventory to Amazon that could be improved?"
Instead of having anecdotal evidence, really starting to surface those patterns, and I think see the relationship as well between low availability and a loss of the Buy Box. Our final report for today that we'll cover is what's going on with the Buy Box. And the Buy Box is worthy of its own webinar all on its own.
Susan:
We're going to spend just a few minutes on it today and there are varying degrees, I think, of sensitivity towards losing the Buy Box depending on the market that you're in. For the UK, for example, the Buy Box has just started to become an issue depending on what you're able to do, right?
You accept the Buy Box loss as kind of something that's the course of doing business, but you're not focusing a lot on it. Our Buy Box report does a great job in a few different ways.
First, I really liked that our Buy Box report contextualizes the loss of your Buy Box here. What this report is showing you is the percentage loss in the last 30 days and the 30 days before, as well as the Amazon rank. You can start to say, "Okay, actually I may not have the buy box right now, but before I let that distract me from my day, I'm winning it most of the time, or this title is deep in my backlist, so maybe this isn't something that I want to focus on.
Susan:
This data is refreshed every single day, so you're really getting, I think, a timely snapshot of what's going on. We also show the third-party seller and the condition. This includes new, used or rental. For some of our professional publishers or textbook publishers, the insight into rental has been essential to this report and helpful in understanding the relationship between new and rental and across the entire list.
I like that we showed a third-party seller so that you can start to get a sense of, "Hey, if this is a legitimate third-party seller, how has that changed the way that I'm prioritizing my sales relationships with these legitimate third-party sellers?" And of course, if it's not, you can act on that more quickly, which is important.