Mastering a 360° Ecommerce Strategy: Analyze, Optimize, and Win

Winter is just around the corner and brands need to do more than just sell – especially during the holiday season.

You need to strategically optimize your digital assets across your website, Google, and Amazon, and gain a comprehensive understanding of where your brand stands and how to improve.

With Similarweb’s all-in-one platform, you can gather detailed insights to fine-tune your ecommerce strategies, track competitor performance, and stay ahead of consumer trends.

What is a holistic ecommerce strategy?

An effective ecommerce strategy is a roadmap for driving online sales and sustained growth. It should encompass key areas like:

• Researching competitors and benchmarking website traffic and engagement performance against D2C (direct-to-consumer) competitors to optimize SEO and paid media strategy
• Striking the right balance between DTC sites and Amazon’s marketplace to fine-tune the sales strategy in line with consumer intent
• Optimizing product visibility across platforms like Google, Amazon, and your own website by building a winning keyword strategy for paid media, social or organic search

The goal is to ultimately boost conversions and revenue. A well-balanced strategy will help increase brand awareness, traffic from the right channels and ROI on retail media spend.

The colder weather is here so let’s take the jackets segment as an example. This season, winning sales for jackets is top of mind for key winter clothing brands like The North Face, Patagonia, and Columbia.

1. Benchmark effectively to capture more traffic than competitors

Here are some key findings from Similarweb’s website performance overview:

• The North Face is attracting more monthly unique visitors compared to the other two brands and leads in capturing a deduplicated audience
• The North Face excels in attracting more unique visitors and effectively managing audience overlap, giving it an edge in overall reach and targeting
• Patagonia visitors are viewing more pages, providing a greater opportunity for conversions

Drill down into key marketing channels

Next, analyze the top marketing channels driving traffic to competitor sites—is it search or referral? Once you know the most popular channels, you can adjust your digital marketing strategy based on this granular competitive analysis to increase your traffic share.

Here, you can see that direct traffic and search (paid and organic), as suspected, play a huge role in sending traffic to these sites.

Columbia is behind the other brands in terms of organic traffic through Google. Optimizing website content, including product descriptions, blogs, and landing pages, with relevant keywords that potential customers are searching for can be a great opportunity to win traffic from competitors.

Take a deeper look at the industry: For example, Jackets segment

Now, let’s build a customized industry analysis for these three brands, specifically for jackets.

Patagonia surpassed the other two brands in year-over-year (YoY) growth in traffic share with a 2.78pp increase from Oct ’24 to Mar ’24.

• The North Face continues to dominate in overall web traffic, but its growth is slowly plateauing

• In contrast, Patagonia has emerged as a strong contender, showing gains in new unique visitors compared to the previous year in the same period.

This indicates that while The North Face maintains a larger audience, Patagonia is effectively attracting fresh customer interest and expanding its reach in the competitive outdoor apparel market.

2. Find the ideal split between selling DTC and on Amazon

Brands are looking to find the right balance between selling directly to consumers (D2C) and selling through online marketplaces (like Amazon).

To achieve the right balance and maximize product visibility, it’s essential to analyze where your audience is between D2C and marketplace channels.

Analyze traffic share on the web for relevant keywords

Who is capturing the maximum traffic share on the web for ‘winter jackets’ related keywords?

Search click share for the “winter jackets” keyword list

We can see that Amazon captures most of the search traffic for the “winter jackets” keyword group, followed by REI and Temu. The keyword group is based on terms these brands are optimizing for.

Patagonia is leading in direct consumer traffic compared to the other two brands online.

A strong Amazon strategy is essential for success across the entire ecommerce landscape.

Analyze traffic share on Amazon for the same keywords 

Using the Similarweb Shopper Intelligence platform, we understand the share of clicks on Amazon for our keyword list:

• Columbia has a higher share of clicks on Amazon compared to The North Face
• Patagonia is currently not capturing ‘winter jacket’ demand on Amazon
• Seasonal trends are also evident in paid clicks, with the share of paid clicks rising as expected during peak winter months.

We can then identify the top-selling products on Amazon for the keyword list:

This reveals that Columbia women’s jackets are a popular choice on Amazon. Optimizing women’s jacket listings is an effective way for other brands to capitalize on the demand for “winter jackets.”

3. Craft an effective keyword strategy to drive more traffic to your product pages

Fine-tuning your keyword strategy on Amazon and Google is essential for improving visibility and targeting the right consumers. By analyzing both branded and non-branded searches, as well as competitor keywords, you can optimize your product listings and paid ads to better align with consumer intent.

Similarweb helps you refine your approach, ensuring you capture high-value traffic and boost conversions across both platforms (Amazon and Google).

Amazon keyword strategy

With Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence Platform, you get powerful, data-driven capabilities to optimize your presence, defend your brand, and accelerate growth in a complex marketplace.

Here we can see that Columbia has a 50% brand share for clicks for the ‘patagonia jackets women’ keyword.

As Patagonia has a limited presence on Amazon, this allows Columbia to bid on their branded keywords to attract high-intent consumers.

Columbia products are also showing up organically for the branded keyword ‘patagonia for women.’

Top keywords optimization opportunities for The North Face

‘Puffer jacket womens’ keyword is high in demand, with more than a whopping 3852% increase YoY for the selected period.

North Face’s current brand share for this keyword is 7.4%, but optimizing for this keyword in its product description pages (PDP) listings can help improve their Amazon ranking organically in line with consumer searches.

Google keyword strategy

When it comes to Google, Patagonia emerges as a clear leader in branded search volume for keywords related to winter jackets, surpassing both Columbia and The North Face.

With Similarweb’s Demand Analysis, gain unprecedented insights to macro and micro trends, enabling a nuanced understanding of consumer behavior.

Mastering ecommerce with a comprehensive approach

For brands selling through their website and Amazon, or those planning to launch on Amazon, leveraging an all-in-one ecommerce analysis and marketplace intelligence platform is crucial for gaining a competitive edge.

Whether benchmarking website performance, analyzing consumer search behavior, or fine-tuning keyword strategies, Similarweb’s data provides the insights you need to boost product visibility, optimize marketing strategies to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and – most importantly – drive more ecommerce sales.

By strategically optimizing your digital presence, you can better position your brand to capture consumer attention, respond to market demands, and succeed in both the D2C world and Amazon.