Blast Analytics and Marketing

SEO and Experimentation Insights Lead to a More Profitable Digital Experience

Supporting Leaders to EVOLVE
passenger train zooming by

Overview

A national railroad company was looking for ways to improve the digital experience for their customers, from acquisition to on-site engagement.

Challenge

Being in the travel industry, our client understands the importance of providing customers with a strong and unified digital experience, from initial engagement through on-site interactions. At the time, the company had plans to transition to a responsive site, as opposed to maintaining separate sites for mobile and desktop/tablet users. However, due to competing priorities, the plans for achieving this responsive site were pushed further down the pipeline. Some teams felt that having separate sites was impacting their work, but they were unable to showcase this impact to get buy-in and take action.

The company engaged Blast to help drive strategy and execution for their efforts on Adobe Target to further optimize the digital experience. As part of Blast’s core strategy, we understand that the digital experience begins even before the visitor reaches the site, and as such, we analyzed on-site and acquisition performance. In doing so, we uncovered a specific customer journey where the digital experience was not optimized for users.

Specifically, our consultants found that several popular Google search queries for the company via desktop led to prominent organic search results intended for mobile users. As can be expected, these mobile landing pages were not optimized for desktop users. We were able to leverage analytics data to show the client that a good percentage of desktop users were, in fact, falling into this sub-par customer journey and that their Booking Rate and Revenue per Visit were suffering when compared to other customer journeys.

Solution

To validate this finding, we recommended running an A/B test where desktop users who were being taken to a highly trafficked mobile landing page would instead get redirected to an appropriate desktop URL.

A benefit of working with Blast is that we work as a single team to ensure our recommendations are evaluated from different vantage points to reduce the risk of potential blind spots. In this case, we collaborated with our search engine optimization (SEO) consultants to ensure our test wouldn’t have an unexpected negative impact for the organization, especially for their marketing team.

Results

Running the A/B test on Adobe Target, we saw that redirecting desktop users to the more appropriate desktop experience had a significant positive impact on key metrics. Specifically, the test variation led to a 13% lift in Booking Rate and a 13% increase in Revenue per Visit. The incremental lift for this test resulted in $150,000 in Revenue.

Incremental lift in revenue: Calculates the amount of lift achieved by the winning experience and the total number of visitors over the life of the test and shows the lift your team might achieve if every visitor sees the winning experience, if the trends continue as they have during the test.

Various teams within the client organization were excited for this test, especially the marketing team since their SEO efforts have been negatively impacted up until this point. The team utilized these test results to make a renewed push to prioritize the effort to build a responsive website. Ultimately, the organization was able to prioritize and move forward with creating a responsive website. Today, desktop users are no longer at risk of encountering a sub-par digital experience.