The client for this analysis is Google’s official merchandise store, shop.googlemerchandisestore.com. This website is the only e-commerce platform that sells Google branded merchandise. The platform is divided across a horizontal menu at the top of the page into different categories. These categories are new, apparel, lifestyle, stationery, eco-friendly, campus collection, and sale. By dividing their e-commerce platform into these categories, Google allows their potential customers to narrow their search and find their desired items much easier.
Their eco-friendly category contains many items that promote environmental sustainability. Among these items are reusable cups, straws, and water bottles, along with recycled journals, pens, and bags. Along with this, certain items incentivize a donation of 1% of your purchase to non-profits who protect the Earth. In recent years, sustainable fashion has become important to consumers. It is important to know how companies are manufacturing their clothes and other items, and it is an added bonus if they choose to donate to non-profits as well.
At a time when streetwear and merchandise are seeing a rise in popularity, many brands are releasing their own merchandise platforms in an effort to improve brand awareness. Among these is Taco Bell. Recently, they launched their e-commerce platform which they call the “Taco Shop.”
Taco Bell, like Google, recognized that they had an opportunity to continue to grow their brand awareness. They decided to do so after developing creative designs that can compete with other clothing and streetwear brands that are popular around the country. In this blog post, I will be presenting an analysis of Google’s official merchandise store’s website performance based upon data from Google Analytics. This analysis will contain data from the year of 2020 only, from January 1st to December 31st.
TOP LEVEL
In our analysis, we will begin with the top-level, which will show the broadest overview of how people are interacting with the website. In 2020, Google’s official merchandise store received 545,224 visits, and 3,685,040 pageviews. Of these visits, Google saw a bounce rate of 46.12%. This bounce rate number is troubling, because according to analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, any bounce rate over 35% is “a cause for concern, and anything above 50% is worrying.” (1) The google merchandise store’s bounce rate being near 50% means that either the website is not attracting the correct people, or it is not functioning to its duty.
ACQUISITION
After analyzing the overall use of the website, it is very important to see where the visitors are coming from. The acquisition report can be a way to oversee digital marketing plans, and whether they are accomplishing their goal: referring people to the website. There are three channels that we will be analyzing in-depth. These are:
1. Organic Search
2. Direct
3. Referral
First, we will look at organic search traffic. Kaushik states that 40-50 percent is normal and should be expected (1). For Google’s official merchandise store, they receive 38.53% of their traffic from organic search, which is very close to the targeted amount. In some cases, if businesses are not satisfied with their traffic from organic search, they are able to use search engine optimization tools to attract customers to their website. Fortunately, Google is likely to not need any of this assistance.
Next is direct traffic, which contains visitors that are familiar with the website in question. This happens when people type the URL or bookmark a specific site. For direct traffic, Kaushik recommends this channel receives around 20%. (2) For Google, they receive 36.31%, which is well above the recommended amount.
Referral traffic is as simple as it sounds. It happens when another website has a link to the website in question, and the viewer clicks from one website to the other. These links can be built by reaching out to platforms that have a bigger reach, commenting on a blog post, or guest authoring an article. Kaushik recommends around 20-30 percent for this channel, and unfortunately, Google’s official merchandise website only reached 9.49% of their users through referral traffic (3). This is an area where Google is undoubtedly below the intended goal, and should attempt to find various platforms to better promote their website and create more referral traffic.
Overall, Google’s official merchandise store reaches a total of 74.84% of their traffic from their top two channels: organic search and direct search. While it is great that they are seeing such high numbers in these categories, this also means that there are other channels that could use more attention. The use of these channels could help improve performance of the website, and improve sales.
E-COMMERCE PERFORMANCE
When assessing an e-commerce website, among the most important aspects to analyze is the funnel visualization, which tracks users of the website throughout their purchasing journey. It shows every visitor who put an item in their cart, who entered their shipping an billing information, all the way through who completed their purchase.
In 2020, Google’s official merchandise website saw a 97,242 users put item(s) in their cart, and only 1,922 of them completed their purchase, shpwing a funnel conversion rate of 1.98%. This means that of those who put an item in their cart, 1.98% of them eventually completed their purchase.
In addition to funnel visualization, it is very important to analyze what products are performing the best in their online store. For Google’s official merchandise store, they saw their “Google Zip Hoodie F/C” product receive $5,496 in product revenue and 4.27% of all product revenue, making it the highest grossing item in their e-commerce platform. Their second-highest selling item is their “Google Utility Backpack” that received $3,552 in product revenue and 2.76% of all product revenue.
CONCLUSION
In my review of Google’s official merchandise store, I have developed three actionable recommendations to improve website traffic.
1. Improve referral traffic.
There is no doubt that Google’s referral traffic can improve. Only reaching 9.49% is well below the intended goal of 20-30%. If Google’s merchandise website can improve their referral traffic, they can drive more visitors to their site in a way that they did not see in 2020. They can do this by reaching out to popular platforms that can help drive more traffic to their website than they saw during 2020.
2. Find solution to bounce rate.
Possibly the most important recommendation I can make is to find a way to decrease the bounce rate. As stated previously, the bounce rate being near 50% is far too high. This could mean many things, but it is likely to mean that either the website is not attracting the correct people, or it is not functioning to its duty. It could take a few attempts of trial and error to find the exact problem. Analytics are good for assessing what the problem is, but not as good for why a particular platform is having a problem.
3. Improve social traffic.
One area that I did not address was social traffic. That is because Google’s reached only 3.3% of their visitors through social traffic. Google has millions of followers across all social platforms, and in my opinion, if they utilized these channels to promote their merchandise, they would see a steep increase in both social traffic and sales.
