The ultimate marketplace analytics guide
Marketplace analytics is how you measure and act on the data behind selling and advertising on marketplaces. It breaks down into financial metrics such as sales and ad spend, marketing metrics such as impressions and clicks, and efficiency metrics such as ROAS, CPC, CPA, CTR, CVR, and search impression share. Read together, these numbers tell you where to shift budget so you sell more profitably.
This guide explains each concept in plain language and shows how to act on the data to improve your results. If you already know the metrics, you can skip ahead to Analyzing your marketplaces for the practical steps.
Marketplace analytics concepts
The core concepts fall into two groups: financial metrics and marketing metrics. Financial metrics cover sales and ad spend. Marketing metrics cover the raw indicators (impressions and clicks) and the efficiency measures (ROAS, CPM, CPC, CPA, CTR, CVR, and search impression share) that you actually optimize against.
One note before you dive in: some marketplaces use different terms for the same concept. This guide tries to cover the common ones. If you think something is missing, let us know and we will update the article.
Financial metrics
The two main financial metrics are sales and ad spend. Sales are the number of units sold multiplied by the sales price. Ad spend can be split into digital spend and offline spend.
On marketplaces you will mainly focus on digital spend, but adding your offline spend to your analytics is still worthwhile, because it helps you set a high level strategy and surfaces valuable insights. Treat sales and ad spend as indicators of the path you are on rather than daily action items. You will adjust ad spend on a daily or weekly basis, and how you adjust it is driven by your marketing metrics and efficiency.
Marketing metrics
Once you start spending on marketplaces, you pay based on either impressions or clicks. These are indicators more than anything else, a kind of proof of pay from the marketplace. They are not actionable on their own, which is exactly where the efficiency metrics come in.
Marketing efficiency
Efficiency metrics are where the real work of a marketplace analyst happens. Interpreted correctly, they let you adjust and allocate spend so that efficiency stays optimal at the scale you want. Here is what each one means and how to use it.
ROAS, return on ad spend. ROAS is similar to ROI, but it looks specifically at the cost of an ad campaign rather than your overall investment. What counts as a good ROAS depends heavily on your business targets, product, and market. On its own ROAS is not actionable, but it gives valuable context to every other efficiency metric.
CPM, cost per mille. CPM refers to advertising bought based on impressions. You do not pay for performance such as sales, you pay per thousand impressions your campaign receives. Buying on a CPM basis is a way to increase brand awareness rather than to directly sell products or services, so it is generally a weak metric to base decisions on.
CPC, also called PPC, cost per click. CPC refers to advertising bought based on clicks, and it is most useful when you have a specific budget to work with. You are buying people's attention, so it is a more expensive bidding strategy, but it tends to bring higher engagement, which can translate into a better return. CPC works best when you analyze and adjust it on a daily or weekly basis to keep it running efficiently.
CPA, cost per acquisition. CPA refers to advertising bought based on a conversion or action. It is mainly used to tightly control your spend and to prevent money going to search terms that do not directly drive business. Because you typically use CPA campaigns to lift your ROAS, aim to keep your CPA at least below your customer lifetime value.
One thing to keep in mind across CPM, CPC, and CPA: you are likely bidding on the same keywords as your competitors, so efficiency matters as much as budget.
CTR, click through rate. CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. Marketplaces often use CTR as a signal of search intent, and the higher your CTR, the more relevant the marketplace considers your ad, which improves efficiency. What counts as a good CTR depends on many factors, so compare against benchmarks. If you fall short, there are plenty of actions you can take to lift it.
CVR, conversion rate. CVR is a metric to watch closely. It tells you whether your ad or product is reaching the right people in the right place at the right time. If it is low, it points you toward what to change, whether that is audience, imagery, calls to action, or price.
Search impression share. Search impression share is the number of impressions you received divided by the approximate number you were eligible to receive. A high share means that, on average, you list above your competition in marketplace search results. It is closely tied to budget, but budget should not be your first lever, because raising it first is very inefficient. CVR, bids, targeting, and CTR all influence search impression share, so optimize those first.
Analyzing your marketplaces
Once you understand the concepts above, analyzing your marketplaces comes down to a repeatable process: set your strategy, centralize your data, shift spend toward what performs best, and make every decision in a data driven way. The four steps below walk through it.
Step 1: determine your strategy
Start by deciding what role marketplaces play for you. How much time and money will you invest in them, and are you using them mainly to build brand awareness or to convert customers efficiently? Your answer sets the targets every later decision is measured against, so it is worth being deliberate here.
Step 2: centralize your marketplaces
If you manage more than one marketplace, bring them together on a single platform such as e-tailize. Centralizing saves time, but more importantly it lets you centralize analytics, and centralized analytics is by far the most important factor in becoming successful across marketplaces.
Step 3: analyze and shift spend
The main way to decide where to shift spend is to find where you get the best efficiency and scale that further until you hit diminishing returns. Where that point lies depends on your strategy and whether your goal is brand awareness or efficient conversion.
Shifting spend or changing budget happens at every level of your structure:
- Account
- Marketplace
- Campaign
- Product category
- Product
- Ad
- Keyword
Working from the account level down to individual keywords lets you pinpoint exactly where efficiency is strongest and weakest.
Step 4: make data driven decisions
Finally, analyze your data and decide, at each level, what is underperforming and what to optimize or change. The best approach is to structure your decision making so you are always acting on data rather than instinct. Building decision trees that use your targeted results as the deciding factors is one of the most reliable ways to keep that discipline.
The right tools for marketplace analytics
Becoming successful on marketplaces starts with a solid foundation, and that means getting your products, advertisements, and analytics into one place. A platform that centralizes them removes the busywork of jumping between dashboards and, crucially, lets you compare performance across channels in a single view.
That is exactly what e-tailize is built for. It helps you centralize products, advertisements, and analytics across your marketplaces, so the metrics in this guide become decisions you can act on rather than scattered numbers you struggle to compare.
Frequently asked questions
- What is marketplace analytics?
- Marketplace analytics is the practice of measuring and acting on the data behind selling and advertising on marketplaces. It covers financial metrics such as sales and ad spend, plus marketing metrics like impressions and clicks, and efficiency metrics such as ROAS, CPC, CPA, CTR, CVR, and search impression share. Read together, these numbers tell you where to shift budget to improve profitability.
- What is the difference between ROAS and ROI?
- ROAS, or return on ad spend, looks specifically at the cost of an advertising campaign against the revenue it generates. ROI, or return on investment, measures the return against your overall investment, which can include costs well beyond advertising. ROAS on its own is not directly actionable, but it gives valuable context to your other efficiency metrics.
- Which marketplace metrics should I check daily?
- Sales and ad spend are best treated as indicators of the direction you are heading, not daily action items. The metrics you adjust most often are the efficiency metrics, especially CPC campaigns, which run best when you review and tune them on a daily or weekly basis. CTR, CVR, and search impression share are the levers you optimize before you reach for budget.
- How do I improve my search impression share?
- Search impression share is the impressions you received divided by the impressions you were eligible to receive, and a high share means you tend to list above competitors. Budget influences it, but raising budget first is inefficient. Optimize CVR, bids, targeting, and CTR first, because these all feed into your search impression share at a lower cost.
- Why does centralizing marketplace data matter?
- If you sell on more than one marketplace, your data lives in separate dashboards that each use slightly different terms. Centralizing analytics in one platform saves time and, more importantly, lets you compare efficiency across channels and shift spend to where it performs best. Centralized analytics is the single biggest factor in becoming successful across multiple marketplaces.