Blog

Ecommerce sales in May grew at the slowest level for 4 years.

According to the new British Retail Consortium (BRC), May’s e-commerce sales grew at their slowest rate for more than four years.

Online sales of non-food products grew by 4.3% in May, this is down from 13.7% a year earlier.  Non-food sales are at their lowest level since the BRC analysis started in December 2012, the BRC-KPMG Online Retail Sales Monitor found.

Across the UK retail industry, sales fell by 0.4% on a like-for-like basis from May 2016, when they had increased 0.5% from the preceding year. Sales rose by 0.2% on a total basis, down from growth of 1.4% a year earlier. This, said the BRC, was the lowest growth since January, once the distortions caused by a late Easter were taken into account.

Continue reading “Ecommerce sales in May grew at the slowest level for 4 years.”

Google updates Store Visits Tool

Google’s Store Visits Tool tracks online interactions and their contribution to walking in store, giving a greater understanding of the multi-channel.

First, by using machine learning, Google has expanded the Store Visits Tool capabilities to measure store visits at scale including visits that happen in multi-story malls or dense cities like Tokyo, Japan, São Paulo, Brazil where many business locations are situated close together.

Continue reading “Google updates Store Visits Tool”

Google offers free cross-channel, multi-platform attribution tools on analytics

Google claims that its new product will measure the impact of marketing across multiple devices and channels.  Although still in Beta, Google are working with selected advertisers and will roll out across a wider audience in the coming months.

Built off Adometry, an online attribution company which Google acquired in 2014.  Google Attribution is a new free solution Google offers as part of its analytics.

Continue reading “Google offers free cross-channel, multi-platform attribution tools on analytics”

Google Analytics to Unify Users Across AMP and Non-AMP Pages

Google Analytics is enhancing support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP’s) by unifying users across both AMP and non-AMP pages.

What is an AMP?

AMP’s were formally announced on Oct. 7, 2015, with support from Google, Twitter, WordPress and several publishers and other companies.  Fundamentally, they are HTML pages designed to be super lightweight and critically designed to make really fast mobile pages.  The AMP project embodies the vision of having content that is “Instant, Everywhere”.

What are the benefits of this change?

This unification will have the benefit of improving overall user analysis, while providing a more accurate understanding of how site visitors are engaging with a website across the two page formats.

Continue reading “Google Analytics to Unify Users Across AMP and Non-AMP Pages”

New homepage in Google Analytics

Google are making more changes to their analytics interface. Today, the company announced plans to give users a new home/landing page that will display after you login.

The new home page will give you summary performance, bringing data from various reports, including real-time data, traffic sources, user location, devices used to visit your website and so forth.
There is some customisation involved, too — if you have goals or e-commerce setup, you will be presented with a different home page than those without, for example. The various reportlets on the new home page will also offer date filters like “last 7 days” and “last 30 days” — so no need to dive into the various reports for those views, making top line understanding much simpler.

The new homepage replaces the current Audience Overview report, which focuses on metrics like sessions, unique users, page views and pages per visit (among other data points). Although that report is still available by clicking on the Audience tab in Google Analytics’ menu.

Continue reading “New homepage in Google Analytics”

4 in 10 searches are on a smartphone

Understanding where the traffic comes from to your website is vital, that’s obvious….Right?  If you understand not only where the traffic came from but what devices your potential customers are using, it will help you further optimise your website, ensuring it is mobile responsive and that you are being found.
The proliferation of devices has changed the way people interact with the world around them, making it critical to provide the same experience across screens.

Device usage

There is no doubt that we are in a mobile-first world, people expect answers at their fingertips, wherever they are.  1 in 5 people use another device while concurrently using a computer.

Continue reading “4 in 10 searches are on a smartphone”