Team Empathy  ·  Baseline Snapshot

Month one: the before picture.

The baseline we measure everything against, for Absolute Essential
Trailing 12 months, Aug 2025 – Jul 2026  ·  Pulled 4 Aug 2026  ·  All figures NZD
What this is. The "before" picture for the AI & Search Foundations Sprint (3 Aug → 11 Sep 2026). We re-take it on the same day each month so every gain is measured against a fixed line. This is a living document: as the work lands, this tab fills with month-on-month movement. Every number below traces to a real pull, nothing is modelled or invented.

1. The headline numbers

110,775
website sessions in the year GA4
$308,866
ecommerce revenue (GA4-tracked) GA4
$119.48
average order value
2.33%
ecommerce conversion rate
17,887
organic Google clicks (1.28M impressions) GSC

One-line read: ~111k sessions and ~$309k of GA4-tracked revenue a year, at 2.33% conversion and $119 AOV. Organic search is the single biggest revenue channel (~32%), but organic is branded-heavy: 1.28M impressions on non-branded queries convert at deep positions (avg 24) and near-zero CTR. That gap is exactly the whitespace the sprint targets. AI-assistant traffic exists (~870 ChatGPT sessions) but is tiny and untracked to orders.

How to read this honestly. Revenue and orders here are GA4 ecommerce, not Shopify. Shopify is the system of record for dollars and will read higher (GA4 typically captures 85–95% of true sales after consent and attribution loss), so treat GA4 revenue as a consistent monthly index, not the audited total, until we reconcile Shopify (see Gaps). Search Console history only reaches 22 Mar 2025, so there is no true year-on-year on organic yet; GA4 has 2+ years, so GA4 year-on-year is valid.

2. Website & revenue GA4

Monthly trend
MonthSessionsTransactionsRevenueConvAOV
Aug 20259,586210$20,2782.19%$96.56
Sep 20258,128221$21,5512.72%$97.52
Oct 202511,726260$33,7052.22%$129.64
Nov 202512,572252$36,5342.00%$144.97
Dec 20259,831202$22,3232.05%$110.51
Jan 20267,336143$15,0301.95%$105.10
Feb 20268,689189$21,0872.18%$111.57
Mar 202610,144248$34,4572.44%$138.94
Apr 20267,485202$22,0132.70%$108.97
May 202610,064238$28,6752.36%$120.48
Jun 20268,809239$30,4482.71%$127.40
Jul 20267,974181$22,7662.27%$125.78
Total / avg110,7752,585$308,8662.33%$119.48

Peak trading Oct–Nov 2025 (pre-Christmas), softest Jan 2026. No spike or collapse that would distort the baseline. Mobile-led: mobile drives 59% of revenue ($183,754) at a 2.57% conversion, ahead of desktop's 2.02%.

Where the revenue comes from — channel mix
ChannelSessionsOrdersConvRevenue% rev
Organic Search23,5937453.16%$98,48531.9%
Unassigned tagging gap14,2516094.27%$84,34127.3%
Direct22,3103001.34%$44,52514.4%
Google paid (Cross-network / PMax)18,8025102.71%$39,81112.9%
Paid Social (Meta)15,2622031.33%$15,2644.9%
Organic Social13,1201441.10%$15,0444.9%
Paid Search (Google)1,243282.25%$5,9971.9%
Organic Shopping1,359231.69%$3,5641.2%
Referral2,175231.06%$1,8350.6%
AI Assistant (ChatGPT et al.)8400%$00%
Two flags, now resolved against Shopify. 1. The $84,341 GA4 "Unassigned" is email. Shopify's own Growth Attribution shows Klaviyo drove $80,459 across 582 orders (mostly returning customers), so this bucket is overwhelmingly email GA4 simply was not tagging. The revenue is fully accounted for; tidying the UTMs just lets GA4 see it too. 2. Paid spend sits outside our view. ~35,300 paid sessions drove ~$61k of revenue, but the spend itself is not captured (Shopify's Cost and ROAS columns are empty because the ad accounts are not connected to Shopify Marketing). It is the one real gap, see below.
Corroborated by Shopify's own numbers. Shopify Growth Attribution (its system of record, last non-direct click, same 12 months) lines up with GA4 almost exactly: Google organic reads $99,457 across 735 orders in Shopify against $98,485 / 745 in GA4, a whisker apart. Shopify also carries what GA4 blurs, new versus returning orders per channel, Klaviyo email ($80,459), and even ChatGPT sales. Where the two systems agree we can trust the number.
Revenue by country
MarketRevenueOrdersConvNote
New Zealand$215,1411,8403.99%70% of revenue, the strong home market
Australia$54,0964902.15%17.5% of revenue
United States$16,0241810.91%heavy traffic, converts far below NZ/AU (US conversion sits with Bo)
Taiwan$9,87417small volume, high AOV
AI-assistant traffic today — the whitespace source scan

GA4's own "AI Assistant" channel logs only 84 sessions, but a raw source scan finds more: chatgpt.com 846 · bing (Copilot-adjacent) 736 · claude.ai 8 · gemini 7 · copilot 3 · perplexity 3. About 870 sessions a year from AI assistants. GA4 attributes 0 orders, but Shopify's Growth Attribution does catch some: ChatGPT shows ~$856 across 8 orders already, before anything is optimised for it. Small, but real AI-sourced revenue, and exactly the number the sprint is built to grow. Other engines (Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) mostly arrive without a referrer inside Direct/Organic, so this still under-counts real AI-sourced demand.

3. Organic search visibility Search Console

Monthly trend
MonthClicksImpressionsCTRAvg pos
Aug 20251,828184,8480.99%37.9
Sep 20251,684115,7271.46%30.6
Oct 20251,77692,5311.92%21.2
Nov 20251,72197,2151.77%24.3
Dec 20251,463104,2941.40%24.1
Jan 20261,517113,7601.33%22.5
Feb 20261,563120,5351.30%17.5
Mar 20261,459110,2111.32%19.0
Apr 20261,17191,6611.28%19.0
May 20261,19384,7701.41%22.8
Jun 20261,23880,2301.54%20.1
Jul 20261,27481,7261.56%20.4
Total / avg17,8871,277,5081.4%24.3

Average position improved over the year (37.9 → ~20) while clicks drifted down (~1,800 → ~1,250): visibility is rising, but CTR at those deep positions is thin. A low-1% CTR at average position ~24 is the headline organic problem the sprint addresses.

Branded vs non-branded — where the opportunity sits
 ClicksImpressionsNote
Branded ("absolute…")4,39833,03558.5% of named clicks. Bo's own demand, high CTR, top of page
Non-branded3,118635,034The opportunity: 20x the impressions, deep positions, ~0.5% CTR

Non-branded queries pull ~635k impressions but only ~3.1k clicks, a huge visible-but-not-clicked base sitting at page 2–3. Closing that is the core organic thesis of the whole engagement.

Top queries & pages
Top non-branded signalsClicksImpressionsPos
essential oils nz19712,5959.4
essential oils12915,3339.1
castor oil for sciatica901,3813.0
essential oils for sciatica691,4342.5

The best non-branded signals are "essential oils nz" / "essential oils" (big impressions, bottom of page 1, low CTR = title and position work) and a sciatica remedy cluster already ranking at positions 2.5–3.7, proof the blog content wins non-branded when it exists. Six of the top ten organic pages are articles (the Encyclopedia / Ask Dr Bo library), which is the asset we structure for AI and link into collections and products.

US organic: 627k impressions but only ~3,138 clicks (~0.5% CTR), enormous US visibility ranking too deep to earn clicks. The entity and structure work is global and benefits every market; US commercial conversion stays with Bo.

Full 12-month query export (25,000 rows, branded flag included): held with your data, and in the client file (gsc-queries-12mo-2025-08_2026-07.csv).

4. Reconciling the three sources

QuestionSearch ConsoleGA4Shopify
Google organic volume17,887 clicks23,593 sessionsn/a
Total revenuen/a$308,866agrees at channel level (Attribution)
Conversion raten/a2.33%3.44% organic (≈ GA4 3.16%)

Why GA4 organic reads higher than GSC clicks (23,593 vs 17,887): three normal reasons stack up, GA4 "Organic Search" includes non-Google engines (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia ≈ +1,050 sessions GSC never sees); the GSC property is non-www only, so any www or http organic is in GA4 but not GSC; and GA4 counts sessions while GSC de-dupes clicks per day. A ~30% GA4-over-GSC gap on organic is within the healthy range, worth re-checking monthly, not worth alarm.

The one gap that does matter: GA4's 27% Unassigned revenue. That is a tagging-hygiene problem (untagged Klaviyo + Shop Pay), and it means GA4 channel revenue will not reconcile cleanly to Shopify by source until it is fixed. Everything else lines up as expected.

5. To complete the baseline — from Bo & Ben

Good news from the review: Shopify's Growth → Attribution tab already gives us the system-of-record dollars, orders, conversion, AOV and new-versus-returning per channel, so most of the earlier asks are covered. One real gap remains:

Already covered, no action needed: revenue, orders, conversion, AOV and the returning-customer split (Shopify Attribution) · Klaviyo email revenue ($80,459) · ChatGPT sales ($856) · GA4 + Search Console access (granted to Ben's account, which is exactly what we pull on).

This tab is alive. We hold and work this document together from here. Each month we re-take the same numbers on the same day, and the movement lands right here, so you can watch the sprint compound against this exact line. Next re-take: early September.
Team Empathy · Search & AI for ecommerce
Baseline pulled 4 August 2026  ·  ben@teamempathy.co.nz  ·  teamempathy.co.nz