The goal of the Google Merchandise store is to tell the products listed on its website. Therefore, the most significant metrics would be conversion rate, transactions completed, and revenue earned from each channel or medium. The best performing mediums are organic searches, direct site visits, referrals, and Google’s cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns. As shown in Table 1, organic searches have a cumulative revenue of $26,464.65, a conversion rate of 2.9%, and has 535 completed transactions. The main sources under the organic searches medium include Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Ask search engines. Although direct site visits reported the lowest conversion rate, it had 152 complete transactions, bringing in a revenue of $10,140.47. Similarly, Google CPC medium made it to the best performing list because of the 87 complete transactions and $4,956.19 in revenues. The referral medium has the highest conversion rates, 3.84%, but with lower complete transactions (six) and revenues ($654.05). The sources under this medium include email, Facebook, YouTube, Wikihow, and DuckDuckGo. Therefore, ranking by revenue, the best performing medium will be organic searches, followed by direct site visits, Google CPC, and finally, referrals.
Table 1: Best performing mediums and sources
Google Store Pages Load Times
The identified slow loading page is titled “Apparel”. It has a load time of 4.42 seconds while the site average is 3.95 seconds. Discrepancies in load times can arise from differences in browsers, users’ connections speeds, computer power, distance from the server, and problematic scripts. The page is slowest when loading from Android Browser, Safari (in App), Android Webview, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers. In addition, the load time is faster than average only in the Americas, with speeds going as low as 42.6 seconds in Africa. The apparel page was compared to the log-in page available at shop.googlemerchandisestore.com. While the apparel page has a continuous listing of products with images, the login page only contains a few lines of text. Therefore, the content differences could affect how scripts are loaded, leading to a slower load time for the page with more content.
Some of the tools useful in analyzing loading speeds include Chrome Lighthouse, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Think With Google. Chrome Lighthouse helps with performance and accessibility testing and improvement. Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes URLs to provide lab and field data, diagnostics, and opportunities. Think With Google offers customized recommendations that website owners can utilize to investigate and increase speeds. Since one distinguishing factor of the apparel page is having many images, a possible remedy would be to use a format specifically made for the web, such as WebP. It compresses PNG and JPG images by 26-34% while maintaining the images’ quality index.
Campaigns
The top three campaigns by Goal 3: Registrations are different for conversion rates and completions. By conversion rates, the three best campaigns are AW Shopping with 6.67%, MIX|Txt – AW – Office following at 1.45%, and MIX|Txt – AW – Accessories with 1.18%. The top campaigns ranked by completions include MIX|Txt – AW – Apparel with 65 completions, Data Share Promo with 41, and MIX|Txt – AW – Brand (US/Cali) with 22. All the campaigns have above site average ratings in the category. For example, MIX|Txt – AW – Apparel was 535.06 more successful in completions than the site average while AW Shopping performed 1,267.93% better than the site average in conversion rates.