Building a framework to score brand websites for Google

In 2019 Google asked Media.Monks what a brand website is worth when marketplaces handle most of the selling. Marketplaces are good at turning purchase intent into sales. But a brand’s own website is the only place where it controls the whole experience, from first inspiration to long-term loyalty. My job was to find a clear, objective way to measure something as subjective as a brand experience.

Conversion numbers alone can’t show what a brand’s own website is worth. A good brand site shows the brand’s character throughout the visit and still makes buying easy. The task was to take emotional things like brand identity and storytelling and find a structured way to judge how well a site delivers them. Our first criteria were too subjective to compare sites fairly, so I turned them into strict, page-level behaviours that could be checked one by one.

The framework scores a website on five things, at five levels. The five things are Visuals, Copy, Interactivity, User Interface and Structure, each looked at through a rational UX lens and an emotional creative lens. The five levels run from “Bare Basics”, where a site just about works, to “Bespoke for Me”, where it adapts to the visitor and feels personal. For the first time, teams could see exactly where a site got its message across and where it fell short.

We used the framework to benchmark the desktop and mobile sites of eight major tech manufacturers, including Apple, Dyson, HP, Samsung and Sony. Many top brands struggled with basic usability, or put all their brand effort into the moment of purchase and missed the research phase before it. The framework then became the structure for in-depth client workshops, where global brands worked out how to improve their own sites.

Amy (Lovin) Grant was a great partner in the assessment phase, and Anael Shoshan Stroh played a big part in extending the framework to FMCG sites.