15% More Retailer Traffic: How Hershey Used Similarweb to Stop Flying Blind on Digital Shelf Performance
The Hershey Company's Challenge
The Hershey Company — one of the world's largest confectionery manufacturers — distributed products through major retail partners whose digital shelf performance was opaque to Hershey's own analytics teams. The company had no independent visibility into how its product pages were performing on retailer sites relative to competitors, which categories were gaining or losing digital traffic, or how consumer search patterns were shifting in response to seasonal events and cultural moments. Hershey's Consumer Insights team described the situation as "flying blind" — making marketing and trade investment decisions without the retailer-side data needed to optimise placement, content, or spend allocation across distribution channels. When competitors gained share on a retailer's site, Hershey typically discovered it through lagging sales data rather than leading digital signals.
How Similarweb Solved It
Hershey implemented Similarweb's comprehensive digital intelligence platform across its Consumer Insights and commercial teams. The platform provided independent visibility into traffic performance on retailer sites — allowing Hershey to benchmark its product pages against competitors without relying on data provided by the retailers themselves. Keyword trend analysis enabled the team to track shifting consumer search intent across seasonal periods, cultural events, and competitive promotions in near real-time. This data was used to inform trade investment decisions, guide SEO and content optimisation on retailer product pages, and identify high-intent audience segments by category. The result was a 360° view of consumer behaviour online — combining Similarweb data with survey data and social listening into a unified intelligence layer that guided both marketing and commercial strategy.
The Outcome for The Hershey Company
After implementing Similarweb, Hershey recorded a 15% increase in product page traffic across key retail partner sites — attributed to data-informed SEO improvements and better keyword targeting aligned to actual consumer search behaviour. The Consumer Insights team gained the ability to track evolving consumer preferences in near real-time and respond to seasonal and cultural demand signals before competitors could capitalise on them. Marketing budget allocation was redistributed toward channels and categories showing the strongest digital demand signals. The platform reduced Hershey's structural dependence on retailer-provided data — giving the brand an independent read on its distribution channel performance that it had not previously had.
What The Hershey Company Learned
Hershey's case captures a structural tension common to large manufacturers selling through retail intermediaries: the brand owns the product and the marketing investment, but the channel owns the shelf and the consumer data. When a retail partner controls the performance data, the manufacturer is perpetually negotiating without independent verification. Similarweb solves a specific version of this problem — not by providing sales-out data, but by providing the digital signals that precede it. Traffic to a product page on a retailer site is a leading indicator of consumer intent; keyword share on a retailer's search is a leading indicator of competitive position. Hershey used these signals to intervene upstream of the revenue impact. For manufacturers with MD05 ≥ 3 (significant reliance on distribution intermediaries), the inability to independently monitor channel-level performance is a structural risk — one that digital intelligence directly mitigates.
- Manufacturers distributing through retail intermediaries face a data asymmetry: the retailer knows what happens on their platform; the manufacturer learns about it through sales data weeks later. Digital intelligence closes this lag.
- Consumer search trends on retailer sites are a leading indicator of purchase intent — tracking them in near real-time allows proactive SEO and content responses rather than reactive budget adjustments.
- Independent competitive benchmarking at the retailer level — rather than relying on retailer-provided data — gives manufacturers negotiating leverage and an unbiased read on their digital shelf position.
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