Online journey hijacking can hurt the customer experience, impacting not only conversion rates but brand equity. It works through malware that inserts unauthorized ads into a customer’s web sessions, diverting them away from a merchant’s site into the hands of a competitor.
Japanese sports apparel and footwear giant Asics was no exception to this problem. Nearly 12% of all Asics’s web sessions were infected by various forms of injected ads throughout the customer journey in 2017. And nearly all of these unauthorized ads (97.8%) led to competitor sites.
“It’s completely invisible to online retailers like us because these unauthorized ads were only visible on the consumer’s browser,” said Jason LeBoeuf, Director of Ecommerce for Asics.
Asics began working with Namogoo. Using its software, Asics gained visibility into the magnitude of the issue and fed data directly to Asics’ Google Analytics platform.
“Once Namogoo explained the issues they were seeing in the marketplace, it started to make a lot sense, especially when they were able to show examples from our own site,” said LeBoeuf. “When you see an actual demonstration on your own website, you think to yourself, ‘How has this been happening without my knowledge all this time, and more so how much revenue has this been costing us?’ ”
Since working with Namogoo, Asics has seen a 14% increase in the conversion rate on Asics.com for infected users, a roughly 5% decrease in the cart abandonment rate, and a nearly 2% increase in overall conversions on its ecommerce website. This was all due to addressing the problem of online journey hijacking.
“For us, this has meant incremental sales of around $1 million per year,” said LeBoeuf. “In addition to the obvious revenue returns, implementation has been seamless as the technology integrates with our Google Analytics and instantly shows the effect of hijacked sessions on site activity.”
LeBoeuf said this technology has allowed customers to view Asics.com as they intended, bypassing the journey hijacking.
“We spend a lot of time with A/B testing and UX improvements, and we don’t want malware-driven popups changing or redirecting customers away from that carefully planned experience,” said LeBoeuf.
He added one of the most interesting takeaways has been that the infected users were actually some of Asics.com’s best shoppers.
“This makes sense when you think about how you become infected – by spending time online, browsing retailers and other various sites,” said LeBoeuf. “These infected users were already our best converting shoppers, so moving the needle on their conversion rate has had a welcomed effect on increasing orders. Among these active browsers, the conversion lift has been more than twice the average.”