An interview with Simon Swan, Digital Growth & Transformation Leader at Karo Healthcare
Karo Healthcare sells consumer healthcare products across multiple categories, markets, and retailers. The vast majority of their sales go through retail partners. Simon Swan leads digital growth and transformation at Karo. In this interview, he shares how his team built a practical framework around digital shelf monitoring. And how it’s become central to driving both visibility and commercial results.
Why invest in Digital Shelf Analytics early?
Many brands still don’t use a Digital Shelf Analytics platform. Karo has been doing so for years. What drove that decision?
For Karo, it comes down to how they sell. Their portfolio spans different categories, SKU mixes, and retailers, each with their own requirements. The moment your products are sold through retail partners, understanding how they actually appear on those websites becomes essential.
Simon:
“A large proportion of our E-commerce sales are not sold direct to consumer but via B&M retailers and online pharmacies, so it’s essential for us to understand how we show up on a retailer website, especially to support our omnichannel strategy and consistency of the brand.”
But it goes beyond monitoring. Simon’s team uses digital shelf data to refine the optimisation techniques that drive visibility and sales through their retail partners. Seeing the problem is step one, acting on it to protect and grow revenue is where the real value sits.
What are the biggest e-commerce challenges when it comes to online retail and marketplaces?
Simon identifies three layers. First, the operational complexity: every retailer and pharmacy portal has different data requirements, image specs, and content standards. Keeping everything consistent across dozens of portals and multiple markets is a constant effort.
Then there’s visibility. Retail media networks, Amazon Sponsored Products, Ocado’s onsite media, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, mean brands need to invest just to maintain baseline visibility.
“For smaller FMCG brands, this creates a structural disadvantage against category giants who can outspend them.”
And finally, the data gap. The retailer owns the transactional data, the browsing behaviour, the email address. Brands are largely blind to who is actually buying their product online.
ROAS is necessary. But it’s not sufficient.
The industry is starting to recognise that ROAS alone tells an incomplete story. Yes, it’s the primary KPI for product ads. But as retailers expand into display formats, video, and in-app placements, the conversation is shifting towards brand awareness and incrementality.
Incrementally, measuring how much extra revenue your ads generate beyond what you would have sold anyway, requires holdout groups and close collaboration with the retailer. That’s complex. And it’s only meaningful if you have a baseline understanding of your organic performance.
This is exactly what Digital Shelf Analytics provides: the baseline. How visible are you in organic search results? What’s your share of search versus competitors? Where are you losing positions and to whom?
Without that baseline, you can’t separate what retail media is driving from what your organic shelf presence is already delivering. You’re measuring in the dark.
How do you translate those challenges into a strategy, and how does Sitelucent fit in?
Simon is clear: e-commerce can’t work in a silo. The strategy has to be connected to business objectives, not led by a dashboard of digital metrics. And it needs to be built around how the team actually works across departments:
“It’s critical to simplify the language used in e-commerce. You can’t drive buy-in across stakeholders if you’re not translating e-commerce language into business language and the impact it’s having on the growth of your company.”
“We’ve simplified the language we use to explain the monitoring of the digital shelf to two concepts:
Easy to Find, can consumers actually discover your products on a retailer’s website?
Easy to Choose, once they’ve found your product, how easy are you making it to choose yours over a competitor?
Easy to Work With, how easy from a business and relationship point of view do we make it to build ecommerce discussions with the retailer? E.g. to discuss online promotions, ways of working and thinking differently to stand out from the crowded categories we play in.”
It turns digital shelf analytics from a specialist topic into something every department can act on.
What are the most important insights you get from the platform?
Simon keeps it tight:
“The platform is configured to answer questions that map directly back to “Easy to Find” and “Easy to Choose”. A simplified weighting score across key metrics gives the team one view that connects monitoring data to commercial priorities, and makes it clear where action will have the most impact on revenue.”
Do you see Sitelucent as a driver of e-commerce success?
“As a small team, Sitelucent is central to how we monitor and measure performance for our brands, being SKU-led, working across teams and departments, and bringing them on the journey with us. Sitelucent provides the data and we use this to add the narrative as to the actions to be taking monthly, as well as how changes and optimisations being made link back to the business goals and KPIs.”
It’s not a reporting tool in a silo. It’s the foundation that makes cross-functional e-commerce conversations possible, and the renevue that comes from acting on them.
If you were to recommend Sitelucent, what would you say?
“Sitelucent changed how we compete. They challenge your thinking, sharpen your strategy, and don’t just show you what’s happening on the digital shelf, they make sure you know exactly where to act.”
For Simon, the message is straightforward: the brands that get visibility into their digital shelf don’t just monitor better, they compete better. And with a framework like “Easy to Find, Easy to Choose” the entire organisation knows where to look and what to do about it.
And if you want to see your own shelf through the consumer’s eyes, book a discovery call with Willem, he’ll walk you through your own data.
