Category Google

Performance Benchmarking meets Core Web Vitals

Google has announced that Core Web Vitals (CWV), a set of 3 core metrics to measure page experience for users, is a ranking signal. (There are *many* ranking signals.) Why three? Well, you don’t want hundreds of metrics, but the experience of users on a site (as distinct from the quality of the content itself) […]

Next Generation Digital Commerce Architecture Daydreaming

Every so often I day dream of what a next generation ecommerce platform would look like. (Yes, this is one of those pie in the sky blogs.) First, I think SaaS platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, and so on do a great job for many ecommerce merchants. What I wanted to focus on in this […]

Personal Thoughts on the Australian News Media Bargaining Code

I’ve been watching the developments with the News Media Bargaining Code back home with interest and thought I’d share my personal take here. (And to be up front, I currently work at Google, an Aussie currently living in the USA.) A real challenge seems to be the profitability of news for revenue generation. I say […]

Explorations in Online Video Outreach

With large portions of the world in lock down , video conferencing and online events are growing in popularity. I have been exploring some of the tools (with an admitted bias towards Google technologies since I work there) trying to work out the best way to kick off an Ecommerce Website Office Hours series (the […]

Sunday musings: The Future of Physical Retail Experiences

I have read a number of articles on retailers experimenting moving their stores to focus on delivering great customer experiences, not stock levels. For example, have a smaller volume of products in stock, but improve the opportunity to experience those items. Then ship the products to the person’s home. That way you can have less […]

Do all these cloud services make designing e-commerce platforms easier?

Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure… its never been easier to spin up a new server. Then comes the raft of managed services: databases, message queues, scheduling, and more. And this is before you get to Kubernetes orchestration and automatic restarts or serverless programming models. But using these tools is it easier to build an […]

The Value of A/B Testing

5 years ago I wrote a blog on “You Can’t Improve what you Can’t Measure”. While the use of “can’t” may have been a little strong, making changes to your website can deliver results you did not expect. If you want to make sure the changes make your site better, you need to have some […]

Get Followers for Your Local Business from Google Maps

Do you want to get followers for your business in your local area? Want to share updates with them about new products just in or special deals to drive more foot traffic to your business? You might want to check out some of the recent enhancements to Google My Business. Google My Business is a […]

Extending Your Web Presence with Structured Data

Structured data helps computers understand your web content more easily and accurately, enabling automated consumers of data (such as Google’s search engine) to create new engaging experiences for users. For example, if you have put your Grandma’s favorite apple pie recipe up on the web and then annotate it with structured data, Google search has […]

Following Your Customers with Google Trends

Businesses from small to large need to satisfy their customers. So how does a business keep up with customer needs and desires? What is in trend or going out of trend? Google provides free access to search term trends at google.com/trends. This can be a useful tool to understand what trends are happening in terms […]