BTS: No Growth this quarter
Plus - some curiosities across site experience metrics
Another quarter means a refresh of the Shopping Index data from Salesforce. This is an industry treasure - and the team (including Caila and Rob, though I expect there is a strong cast developing together) deserve credit for delivering this battery of benchmarks to us each quarter.
Change is always compelling - and this quarter brings a heavy dose of it. A few insights I gleaned from this edition:
Hard to look past 0% growth. Harder still to stomach 5 consecutive quarters of same-site-sales that haven’t nudged out of a tight range of -1% to +1%. This quarter’s 3% lift in traffic is a good consolation, and it hints at a UX opportunity across commerce. I’d be really interested to know the distro of up/flat/down across sites. The ‘show up and grow up’ days of digital are over, and I expect there is performance separation, and better yet, reasons for that separation.
I’m still brow-furrowing a bit over the lighter-than-expected search share and GMV contribution. Search plays a different role on every site, serving unique catalog and brand needs. For all, there’s a balance of some shoppers that know what they’re after, and others who are looking for inspo. Delicning search usage in aggregate indicates that something is out of balance. Maybe those PMax campaigns are really delivering, or the email team is hyper-targeting. Something’s happening, and it will be interesting to watch the direction.
Here’s your quarterly reminder that traffic AND orders are mostly mobile. Mobile traffic swelled 8%, while computer fell 8%. 3 in 4 visits are mobile, ~2 in 3 orders are, too. And don’t forget that there’s more PAID mobile traffic than all computer traffic (via Contentsquare).
But… mobile add-to-cart rate ticked down ~2%. Those visits are slightly less intentional.Finally, there’s not yet a debate about which owned channel is more important; email still beats SMS in a landslide. But, are you still list building in SMS? SMS message growth (combined with OTT and push) is tapering off though still elevated at 28%.