Metrics that matter to Seelk

Amazon’s marketplace has over 12 million products in its catalogue, 5 million marketplace sellers, and owns half of the entire eCommerce market. Seelk’s mission is to make sure that businesses who participate in this incredibly competitive online marketplace profit and grow exponentially.

With a focus on medium-sized and blue chip companies based in France, U.K., Germany, Italy and Spain, Seelk helps Amazon vendors track business KPIs, analyze product data, and keep an eye on the competition. It does this through a business intelligence product it calls Studio. 

In our latest edition of the Metrics That Matter series, Seelk Product Manager Nathaniel Daudrich helps us learn more about:

1. The “stickiness” metrics he tracks to measure healthy user engagement in Studio
2. What vendors should pay attention to on their product pages
3. The metric that helps you analyze sales performance on Amazon

Mixpanel: What data does Seelk gather to understand users on a deeper level?

I expect a user to engage with a variety of features to understand more dimensions of their business on Amazon. And to gauge product stickiness for Seelk Studio, here are the questions I ask and answer with Mixpanel:

• Are vendors changing the date range? And do they compare sales to a previous period? 
• What filters are vendors using to analyze their Amazon sales?
• What actions are they taking inside of the graph? Which chart types are they using?
• Are they exporting data?

I view this data by persona to make sure the user behavior we are seeing is intended. For instance, an executive director would maybe come in once a week to check global sales scores. Meanwhile, an account manager would be coming in on a daily basis to keep tabs on granular performance.

Mixpanel: What questions should sellers and vendors be asking about themselves when conducting business on Amazon?

To measure which products are leading the most or least to sales, there is a metric called contribution to growth (CTG). You can measure products, or product groups, to get an overall understanding of the health of your sales. It tells you, essentially, which products are performing best or worst on Amazon and what you should optimize to drive sales where it matters the most. (You can learn more about CTG here.)

Amazon businesses face the daily challenge of ensuring that their products conform with Amazon’s A9 algorithm. Better compliance means a higher search rank – therefore each business needs to know:

• Do my product pages have optimized content (good title, bullet points, description, advanced content etc.)?
• Are my products’  images high-res?
• Does my content contain recommended  keywords?
• Are my products in stock?
• Have I priced my products competitively?

Mixpanel: When was user analytics data most helpful to your business?

Onboarding has been a unique challenge that data has helped us tackle. We expect that following a demo we’d see an upsurge in customer activity. But that isn’t always the case. It turns out we can’t just do a demo and training and expect users to keep coming back. We need to give users the analysis they actually need based on who they are as an employee.

So to solve this, we figured out our users by persona, and we sent messages about their sales activity that would be relevant to them. Eventually we found users making their own analyses instead of dropping off, because of these relevant messages. 

Mixpanel: Seelk is in a transitional phase, moving from agency to SaaS. What are the mechanics of that transition?

Right now there are two parts to Seelk that are, over time, coming together. The agency side focuses on helping business figure out how to get started on Amazon, how to run their current brands on Amazon better, and provide ongoing strategy and support.

On the SaaS side, we’re very data-centric. That includes pulling in data not only about product pages and sales, but providing market data to our clients so they can analyse the competition. 

For the last couple of years, we’ve been dogfooding Seelk Studio internally with our agency staff. Over time, we’ve onboarded different businesses into the product. We eventually want to make this software available to other agencies, and we plan to give users actions based on insights from the data that we pull. 

We also want to make sure that we are working with larger companies. One way we do this is by purposefully not offering a self-serve product. We’re really focused on  blue chip companies that have a large vision for Amazon, whether that be logistics or long-term sales strategies by country.

Mixpanel: How are you sharing product data with broader organization?

I present metrics to a product committee. I open up Mixpanel with dashboards to explain specific behaviors, which helps me orientate stakeholders and set priorities. These numbers are attached to our broader OKRs.