Product Page Auditing: The Missing Step in Your Content Process

I’d imagine most people within your organization don’t have a solid appreciation or understanding of how much effort is required to get quality, accurate, and optimized product content onto your retail or distribution sites. And surprisingly enough, they probably may not even appreciate the importance of product content when it comes to your online sales.

Lots of Room for Error

Getting your product pages live is typically a 2 to 3 month, manual process that touches many hands across many teams and many organizations. These step-by-step “hand-offs” result in delays and errors that impact your bottom line. Every. Single. Day. 

That’s why many brands, retailers, and agencies are turning towards automation. It enables product page auditing and monitoring at scale to ensure they’re maximizing the bottom line.

Choosing the Right Auditing Frequency

Whether you’re using Content Status or taking a manual approach, you’ll want to determine the best frequency for auditing your content and your competitors. We’ve outlined the four most common options below as you consider what strategy is right for your business.

• Daily.  Daily audits are typically best for organizations who want to stay on top of the Buy Box, store-level content, and pricing and availability for their products or their competitors. Daily audits for content quality isn’t typically necessary, and it’s rare that organizations are prepared to act within 24 hours.
  *Tip: Best for Buy Box monitoring (price and availability) and store-level content accuracy.

• Weekly.  By far the most common choice, weekly audits provide the optimal frequency to avoid negative content impact. If errors, issues, or unauthorized content changes happen, you’re able to react quick enough before it has a major impact on your bottom line.
  *Tip: Best for most sellers, and definitely those selling on marketplaces.

• Monthly.  Monthly audits are ideal for B2B products or any other products that do not have frequent content changes. *Tip: Best for B2B, and definitely those not selling on marketplaces.

• Flex.  Any frequency outside of the above options is considered a one-time audit. These audits are typically limited to seasonal products, low price (sub-$3), or competitive audits.  That being said, most online sellers audit their competitors on a monthly basis.

Summary

Companies using a manual audit process are only able to complete partial audits – a small sampling of pages once or twice per year. And, they don’t have the bandwidth to even consider analyzing competitors. Unfortunately, a manual approach costs you more money than it takes to simply automate. 

With Content Status, not only can you regularly audit and monitor your own product pages everywhere you’re selling, but you can scale your analysis to include competitors. Get in touch today if you’d like to discuss the best strategy for your organization.

Scorecard Types

Basic Scorecard

• Title character count
• Description character count
• Bullet count
• Image count

Advanced Scorecard

• Specs count
• # of Used Keywords
  • Title
  • Description
  • Bullets
• Video usage
• Enhanced content usage
• PDF usage
• 360 usage
• Ratings count
• Reviews count