I greatly enjoyed chatting with Fei Wang, founder of Source Medium, who shares some great insights about current data challenges faced by ecommerce merchants. Fei shares Source Medium’s origin story, the role his company plays in helping omnichannel marketing make better data-driven decisions, and the typical pain points experienced by brands when they attempt to scale.
We then get into a discussion of GA4 and the difficulties that many marketers have experienced adapting to Google’s decision to deprecate Universal Analytics. As Fei observes, “It took years for essentially most of the Internet to adapt to how GA Universal was set up and actually learn how those things work. Right now, very few people feel like they have a good grasp on how (GA4) actually works. So that obviously leads to a lot of misconfigurations, which leads to the data being even more inaccurate than before.”
Fei and I discuss GA4’s use of sampling, which many ecommerce merchants may not be aware of, the fact that analytics platforms often produce data discrepancies, and the broader attribution issues that can crop up when merchants attempt to reconcile data from multiple sources or are simply overloaded by this data. Then we trade anecdotes about the bad things that can happen when merchants make strategic decisions based on bad data.
I wanted to get Fei’s thoughts on Amazon — a marketplace that some DTC merchants have embraced while others continue to fear. As Fei notes, “I think it’s important to have a presence on Amazon, because if someone sees you on YouTube or TikTok or even on TV or via streaming, there is a nontrivial chance that they’re going to go either directly to the website, but more likely than not, they’ll be going to do a Google brand search or Amazon search. Amazon is a starting destination in terms of discovery. So if you’re not there, your competitor could be capturing that potential intent.” At the same time, merchants may need to employ specific strategies to avoid sales cannibalization. As Fei notes, one technique might be to limit the number of SKUs available on Amazon or make the deal on Amazon slightly less attractive than what’s available on one’s site.
Fei believes that many brands are overlooking real opportunity by avoiding Amazon. He notes that “Amazon advertising is actually the fastest sort of marketing spend growth among our customer base. And within that, Amazon-branded advertising is the fastest growing sub vertical…Â people are using Amazon as a brand awareness channel already.”
