Ecommerce and retail

The decision

One person decides, usually in a single session, often on a phone. The decision is made on price, delivery promise and returns policy, in that order, and a missing delivery date loses the sale.

Cycle: minutes to days for considered purchases, with cart abandonment the main loss point rather than lead loss.

The numbers that count

The measures this sector is actually judged on:

• Revenue and margin per session, separately
• Organic revenue share by category
• Return on ad spend against contribution margin, not revenue
• Feed approval and disapproval rate
• Category page entry rate
• Returns rate by acquisition channel

Shopping and Performance Max on a clean feed, category-level organic, marketplace presence where margin allows, and paid social for discovery on visual categories.

The avoidable loss

Optimising return on ad spend against revenue while margin varies three-fold across the catalogue, so the campaign scales the products that lose money.

Where Ecommerce and retail demand sits geographically

The sector is not evenly spread, and the markets below are the ones where this work comes up most often:

• Dubai, a market where construction and fit-out keeps this sector busy
• Abu Dhabi, a market where construction and infrastructure keeps this sector busy
• Sharjah, a market where building materials trading keeps this sector busy
• London, a market where education keeps this sector busy
• Manchester, a market where digital, media and broadcast keeps this sector busy

Each of those has its own local page, because the sector’s constraints and the market’s own behaviour both change the plan.

Common questions

Should faceted navigation be indexable in ecommerce?

Selectively. A facet combination that people actually search for, such as a colour and size within a category, deserves an indexable page with its own title and some content. Everything else should be crawlable but not indexable, because the alternative is thousands of near-identical pages competing with each other and burning crawl budget that the category pages need.

Why does return on ad spend look fine while profit falls?

Because return on ad spend is measured on revenue and the catalogue has different margins. If the algorithm is rewarded for revenue it will find the cheapest conversions, which are usually the lowest-margin products. Feeding contribution margin into the bidding, through a custom label or a value rule, changes what the campaign optimises for.

How much does the product feed affect visibility?

More than the website does, in Shopping and in Performance Max. Missing GTINs, wrong categories, stale availability and poor titles cause disapprovals and weak matching, and no amount of bid management fixes a feed that is 30 percent disapproved. The feed audit is the first job, not the last.

Do product reviews help rankings or just conversion?

Conversion first, and rankings indirectly through engagement and through the additional text reviews add to a page. Review markup can produce rich results for products, but inventing reviews or marking up reviews that are not visible on the page is a manual-action risk, not a shortcut.

Should a retailer sell on marketplaces as well as its own site?

It depends on margin and on whether the brand can survive the comparison. Marketplaces bring volume and take margin and customer relationship with it. The usual answer is both, with the marketplace carrying commodity lines and the owned site carrying the margin-rich range, supported by category content the marketplace cannot replicate.