Tips for Measuring Digital Catalog Performance

This part is something that can get quite debated because what are you even optimizing for? Read-through rate, revenue, time spent, or something else?

The way we see it, all of those are signals that can't be defined as success alone. Did someone spend a lot of time in your digital catalog because the navigation was poor? Did someone read through all to the end because they couldn't find what they were looking for?

Some signals are actually signs of poor performance instead of great performance. So how can you do it?

We think you should measure all of the above, of course, but our golden rule of thumb is the restaurant principle: do people come back to your restaurant after visiting it? In this case your webshop/digital catalog.

If they come back – and prefer the digital catalog – then it's a great signal of success.

If they come back, then other signals like time spent and read-through rate can then be seen in a new light. If people return, then time spent can be a good quality signal because they enjoy it. Whatever you do, look at data with a grain of salt.

With the rise of 100 % digital catalogs you can start to self-optimize your digital catalogs, which is a super interesting concept. Instead of a fixed PDF, a 100 % digital catalog can change over time depending on what works. For Incito, the new technology for this, it can actually run a set of autonomous experiments to test if something works. For example, it can change the order of sections, shuffle around product priorities etc. For each experiment, it compares performance to the baseline. If it outperforms the baseline, it will use the new experiment as the new baseline instead.

As you might be thinking, 100 % digital catalogs change the entire dynamics of what it means to create a catalogs, and we've only just gotten started.