UX is important but check all channels
A few new releases from Google last week, including allowing retailers to use the merchant centre regardless of them having ad campaigns or not. Another slow release is what they are calling their `Google Playbooks` that are a collection of best practises which make for fascinating reading and enforce many of the beliefs we apply to our revenue focused clients.
What I learned
- You’re leaving money on the table if you’re a retailer without ads
- Google Playbooks highlight best practise
- They’re an excellent checklist for your own site
- They cover all industries
- Don’t ignore user behaviour through different channels
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. A few things coming out from Google last week. Firstly, the merchant centre, they’re now letting retailers use it who may not have ad campaigns. So they’re actually encouraging retailers to get all their data in order to make their search engine work better of course. And get all the structured data set up on it and then go and upload the feeds to the merchant centre so Google can help them … help Google find all their products for search. And then Google will make those products available on search, and also images and those sorts of things.
So, if you are a retailer and you’re not doing ads, you’re leaving money on the table. So, certainly I think any retailers I know would be going, “Oh yeah, okay, great, merchant centre, but, they’d already be using it.”
Google Playbooks
The other thing that they announced a couple of weeks ago … or they’re just releasing a few things, is what they call their Google Playbooks. Now if you go and Google ÒGoogle Playbooks,Ó you will actually get Google Play … Books. So someone didn’t think that one through. It’s your search engine, Google.
Anyway, don’t go there. Alright? Don’t go to the … What is it? The Play Store. Where you wanna go is just … hang on, I’ll spell it right. Google UX Playbooks is what we want, and you’ll find Barry Schwartz articles there as well, where you can go ahead and have a look at.
But basically these playbooks are what Google is calling best practise, and I had a look at this one last week, this is the latest version of the retail one, which is where my interest lies. And there was tremendous stuff in there, just like it’s stuff that we’re doing and we’re going, “Oh, oh look! Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick!”
And there’s a couple of things in there that we thought, “Ooh! I’m going to try that one, I want to try that one, I want to try this one on that client, and that one on that that client,” so really good stuff. And these playbooks are generated from the immense range of data that Google has.
And they’ve got them for all sorts of industries. I’m mainly just looking at retailers at the moment, but you can go … and see I’ve just done a site calling search on the directory where they’re stored, and you can see here we’ve got one for finance, we’ve got one for auto, we’ve got them for AdSense, we’ve got them in Spanish, we’ve got them for Ramadan, we’ve got them for … there’s a whole bunch of different playbooks there. And also a few interesting files. There’s even one here from the mobile movement from 2011, so there you go.
User Behaviours
But, one of the things that these sorts of documents won’t tell you, they’ll tell you the best practise, but what we’re seeing is the different behaviours from the different channels and why that they enter your site. Like a direct user might use your site differently to a new user who’s coming through organic ’cause the direct user knows it better.
And this is just one channel that we’ve been working on with this particular client, and we’re looking at mobile at the moment, well we’re looking at it overall, but the biggest effect that this change has had for this client is in mobile, and this is just year on year for this month.
And overall the mobile traffic has gone up 167% through this channel, which is actually organic, so this is all organic channel but also then using site search. So what I’m looking at here is mobile users using site search have come in via organic. And just trying to get a feel of why they’re best converting user on this site. And once we learn from that we can then start making adjustments for the other users that are coming to the site.
And we’re already doing that at the moment, but you can see there, what have we got? We’ve got a sample size of … yeah, so this is about three weeks worth of data, and we’re looking at a tripling of the mobile traffic year on year, and for well, sorry, doubling and we’re tripling here or 160% to 219% in revenue.
I’m only talking seven transactions overall during that time. But it just gives us an indication how the changes we’ve made are going through the different users on the site, because you might do a change on your site, which might be great for one user, but it’s not necessarily good for another user who’s coming in from another way and is expecting a different experience.
But go and have a look at those UX Playbooks, ’cause there’s a lot of great stuff in there. And if you have any questions, then please let us know. And if you’ve got any suggestions for the show, then, we’re all ears. And hey, please share, and click subscribe if you’re watching us on YouTube. Thanks very much. Bye!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
