What is CPG Data Analytics?
CPG analytics is the collection and interpretation of data from various sales and marketing sources. Without analytics, it’s nearly impossible to turn raw data into actionable insights. For example, knowing your percentage of all commodity volume (% ACV) or total distribution points (TDP) is helpful, but analytics help you determine what to do with this information.
At its core, CPG analytics answers questions like:
- Where are my products selling best?
- Who’s buying them—and how often?
- Which promotions are truly incremental?
- What’s the ROI of my marketing spend?
Why CPG Analytics Matters for Emerging Brands
Emerging brands face unique challenges: competing with global giants, navigating retail complexity, and stretching every trade dollar. CPG analytics helps level the playing field by turning raw data into actionable insights that drive:
- Smarter assortment decisions
- More profitable pricing and promotions
- Higher ROI from marketing investments
- Stronger retailer sell-in stories
With the right tools, you can move from reactive to predictive—and from surviving to scaling.
How CPG Analytics Improves Efficiency
Predicting shopper behavior can be challenging. Focus groups may not reflect real-world decisions. But CPG data analytics offers real-time insights into actual consumer behavior, allowing you to refine your strategy for continuous innovation and growth.
The process works like this:
- Sell products
- Collect retail measurement and panel data
- Make adjustments
- Repeat
This cycle ensures that your brand stays focused on what sells. If a product isn’t performing well in a specific market, you can either remove it or replace it with a better-selling item to streamline operations.
Three Powerful Solutions.
One Smart Investment.
In today’s competitive landscape, growth requires smarter
decisions, faster execution, and deeper insights. NIQ’s
Emerging Brands Analytics Essentials brings together three of
our most impactful solutions to help you grow distribution,
optimize trade spend and maximize marketing ROI all in one
package.
What are some important CPG data analytics KPIs?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to understanding the success of your brand’s data analytics.
Here are some critical KPIs:
How to Use CPG Analytics
On a brand level, CPG data analytics should inform you of growth opportunities and where to cut losses and expenses. Remember the cycle of continuous improvement? You can only deploy that with data-driven analysis. Otherwise, you could make adjustments that hurt your brand more than they help. On a more specific level, here are some tips on how to use CPG analytics:
- Focus on Losses – Rather than tinkering with products or categories that are performing well, focus your attention and investment on sections that are losing money. This way, you can determine whether to cut or correct them and streamline your operations accordingly.
- Start Small – Don’t try to incorporate analytics into every part of your operations at once. Instead, begin with a specific KPI and figure out how to use it to improve operational efficiency. As you go, make changes to ensure smoother sailing as you move forward. Once you have that process dialed in, move onto the next KPI.
How to Get Started: A Crawl-Walk-Run Approach
- Start Small: Choose one KPI (e.g., purchase frequency) and build a process around it.
- Focus on Losses: Don’t just optimize what’s working—fix what’s not.
- Test and Learn: Use scenario modeling to simulate changes before rolling them out.
- Tell a Retailer-Ready Story: Use data to build compelling sell-in narratives that resonate with buyers.
Final Thought: Compete Smarter, Not Louder
You don’t need the biggest budget to win. You need the best insights. With CPG analytics, you can make smarter decisions, faster—and prove your value to retailers, investors, and consumers alike.
For emerging or growth CPG brands, this can seem particularly daunting. Fortunately, our Byzzer™ platform can help by providing comprehensive reports that help you understand shoppers’ needs and behaviors better. Best of all, we’ll give you actionable insights so that you know what to do next to grow your brand.
Ready to take the next step?
