As many as 19% of online customer journeys for UK footwear retailer schuh used to get interrupted by various forms of injected ads, often from competing brands. These ads, generated when consumers unknowingly infected their browser or smartphone with malware, were not visible to schuh’s online team — but they were definitely a visible distraction for shoppers.
Namogoo alerted the schuh team about the extent of the online hijacking problem in June 2014, according to Stuart McMillan, Deputy Head of eCommerce at schuh. “I was a bit surprised about the extent of the problem, but given the diversity of users on our web site it made sense,” McMillan said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The biggest surprise was that I hadn’t even considered the problem until Namogoo came along.”
The retailer used Namogoo’s solution to block unauthorized ads, generating results including:
Advertisement
• A nearly 15% increase in average conversion rate;
• A 29% decrease in checkout abandonment rates for infected users; and
• An overall conversion increase of 2.78%.
Schuh, a Scottish high street retailer with 130 stories in the UK and Germany, initially ran a 50/50 A/B test with the Namogoo solution. “That was enough traffic to judge its performance at the 95% confidence interval,” said McMillan. “Since the solution went live, we have moved from a 50/50 split to a 3/97 split. The 3% control gives us continual visibility of performance.”
McMillan and his team now use a range of tools to monitor and maintain the integrity of the online customer journey: “We carry out a lot of journey monitoring using session recording, which includes some machine learning to highlight sessions with issues,” he said. “We also have a lot of monitoring of the application state. But apart from that, we have nothing quite like Namogoo.”
