There’s been talk for some time about the collapse of the traditional “funnel.” Consumers no longer move along a linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase, and they haven’t for years. Now, with the rise of AI-powered search and discovery, that path to purchase is becoming even more fragmented and variable. But regardless of how ecommerce evolves from here, core hubs of commerce activity and intel will remain — and one of those hubs is the app and website of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart.
Walmart’s digital platforms feature 20 million first-party items that are shopped by millions of consumers every week. That’s a lot of insight into what consumers are looking for and ultimately buying. For years now, Walmart has been working to coalesce that data and make it accessible to its suppliers through the Scintilla suite of insights tools, to help improve not only sales performance but also the customer experience.
“The customer journey is really not linear, and with that level of assortment and all the different entry points into our site and our app, we wanted to provide a product that delivers really robust insights around the digital shopping journey,” said Linda Lomelino, Group Director at Walmart Data Ventures in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. That way, “both suppliers and internal users alike can understand how customers are shopping our site and app, as well as [determining] what these pre-purchase behaviors are so that we can make the customer experience even better going forward.”
Now that data is getting an upgrade with a series of enhancements to Scintilla’s Digital Landscapes tool, including the addition of 15 new metrics and a revamped user experience.
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“We see the priorities in the [Walmart] business, and we hear from our suppliers all day,” Lomelino said. “As a product person, you want to make sure that you’re delivering exactly the value that you hope to deliver, and a lot of that [right now] is driven by an increased importance of the PDP [product detail page], but also making sure that we can cater to things like viral moments. And the piece that is really critical is being able to see the metric and then pivot strategy quickly.”
That’s exactly what skin and haircare brand E.T. Browne, an early beta tester of the new Digital Landscapes experience, was able to do. The company noticed a massive surge in transactions for its Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Firming Formula lotion, and using insights from Walmart shopping sessions was able to track the upswing back to a viral moment on TikTok.
“Once they understood what was actually happening, they capitalized on that moment and adjusted their forecasting and replenishment strategy to accommodate the increased traffic coming to that product,” said Lomelino. “They took what could have been a pretty large supply chain challenge and used it to really drive sustained growth going forward.”
What’s New in Digital Landscapes
The Digital Landscapes product launched last June and has been available to Charter members of Scintilla — who pay a subscription fee for enhanced data access and tools — for over a year now. E.T. Browne isn’t alone in finding the enhanced tool useful, with Lomelino saying that the response from beta testers has been “overwhelmingly positive.” Now the experience is live for all Charter members.
Enhancements include a complete redesign of the user experience aimed at making the insights “super consumable,” so that both data experts and non-experts can “visualize the insights in a more effective way and understand what a metric means and how it drives the business,” said Lomelino. “You’ll see things like a Sankey chart [a type of flow diagram] that really beautifully describes how traffic is both coming in and exiting our site and our app, to help [suppliers] understand if there are improvements they can make to drive traffic to their product page or drive conversion.”
The update also includes the addition of 15 incremental metrics, including:
- Enhanced traffic insights to show where customers started their journey, whether it be from a social media platform, a search engine, coming directly to the Walmart site or app or any other online channel;
- Enhanced conversion insights to visualize how many visitors are actually converting;
- The new Digital Basket metric, which shows what customers are adding to their cart and what they are they leaving behind, informing abandonment rates and insights to drive conversion;
- New metrics around search, including the keywords customers are using to search a particular category or product, so suppliers can better understand what’s trending, but also what the customer’s frame of mind is as they’re searching; and
- The new Content Quality Score metric, which helps suppliers understand the quality of their product content. “As you can imagine, this one is very tactical in terms of places where content can be improved — replace the hero image, add better descriptions, etc.,” said Lomelino.
Insights Designed to Drive Business Results
Suppliers can view aggregate metrics on their full Walmart product slate or drill down to the single UPC level. What’s not available are competitors’ metrics, for obvious reasons, but Lomelino said that with the new search insights, brands will be able to learn a lot about category-level behavior.
“These enhancements can really drive improved digital strategies, whether it’s advertising or supply chain or just a better understanding of how customers search for the category,” Lomelino added. “What we’re trying to drive on our side is improved discoverability, improved product conversion, increased purchases and loyalty over time, which fits in really nicely with the larger mission of becoming America’s favorite place to shop.”
Data Helps Refine Advertising Campaigns
Of course, one of the most important ways suppliers will use this data is to inform their advertising strategies, which at Walmart means the Connect retail media business.
“They can allocate their digital spend more effectively, because they understand the digital journey much better with the insights that we provide,” said Lomelino. “Not only that, but then in real time they can optimize campaigns that are in flight by understanding if the campaign is driving the behaviors they expect it to be driving.”
And of course, given that one of Walmart’s biggest strengths is its physical store network, other Scintilla modules offer omnichannel insights into shopper behavior and product sales performance.
“What we have heard from our suppliers very broadly is that they’re triangulating the Digital Landscapes data with all of the other transactional data so they can optimize for broader messaging,” said Lomelino. “So if you see keyword searches that point to something very specific or something viral, suppliers are obviously going to be able to capitalize on some of those signals and then leverage them, whether it’s in-store or online, through Walmart Connect or their traditional marketing assets.
“Walmart’s mission is to make the digital shopping experience intuitive and help customers find what they’re looking for as seamlessly as possible,” she added. “By empowering both our suppliers and our internal users to have those insights, they can work on behalf of this mission of helping us give customers the most seamless experience possible.”
