With Customer Journey Hijacking Gone, eCommerce Conversion Rates Rise

Improving the customer journey is at the heart of eCommerce investments made today, from digital marketing, personalization, and multivariate testing, to seamless checkout and swift payment processes. To most digital commerce managers, putting these pieces together successfully is all about reaching that optimal customer experience — it’s what effectively generates top-line revenue and moves the proverbial needle for your eCommerce metrics.

The king of eCommerce KPIs is conversion rate. That’s why any disruptions to this carefully developed customer experience (CX) undermine all of these above-mentioned efforts, and it’s your conversion rate and other key KPIs that take the hit as a result. And having your CX invaded by ads from direct competitors? It doesn’t get any more disruptive than that.

But until recently, most online retailers were unaware that invasive ads where targeting their visitors and redirecting them to competitor sites. This hidden phenomenon, now known as Customer Journey Hijacking, may have taken years to identify, but it’s rather quickly opened the eyes of eCommerce executives upon seeing how these ads interfere with the customer experience, hurt conversion rates, and cut directly into online revenue.

At Namogoo, we’ve gone to great lengths to created an intelligent customer hijacking prevention platform that quickly and easily uncovers and prevents all the hidden, malicious ads interacting with your site visitors – to ensure their experience is exactly as you intended.

In our customer case study with Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing platform, SVP Marketing Rich Pearson shares how he felt when he witnessed first-hand how hijacked users were actually experiencing their site:

“At first, like many people, I thought ‘this can’t be happening’. Until you actually see the videos for yourself, it’s pretty disturbing to see what’s happening to your customers. When you see the ways these ads are interfering with our users, you think ‘Oh my God, it’s really that bad’. And when our initial tests also show this is real, it becomes a no-brainer that we have to fix this.”

After spending millions of dollars to bring traffic to their website, home-improvement retailer Build.com learned that 20% of their site visitors had infected browsers causing ad injections to their customer journey. This video captures their shocked initial feelings and shares the actions they took to put a stop to it:

Surprised reactions like these have been consistent by eCommerce teams across verticals, and for good reason. These malware-driven ads are injected into the consumer’s web browser and cannot be detected by standard server-side solutions. That’s why Customer Journey Hijacking has truly managed to remain invisible to online businesses until recent years.

Each consumer is served ads based on their individual browsing behavior that layer over the site they are viewing using their web browser, which is why the majority of ads feature promotions from competitors.

Scott Dunbar, Head of Operations and DevOps for Office Depot Europe and its Viking Direct brands across the continent recalls his team’s dismay the first time they viewed the rival promotions showing up to their hijacked users: “The most concerning were the ads from our competitors. Office Supplies is an incredibly competitive industry. If our customers are being enticed by our competitors while browsing our own website, that impacts our bottom line.” Read the full case study.

With Customer Journey Hijacking Gone, eCommerce Conversion rates Rise!

As frustrating as it is for eCommerce teams to find out how many of their users are being diverted away from their site, they are also happy to share the good news after preventing customer journey hijacking: eCommerce Conversion rates rose markedly when taking these injected ads out of the CX equation.

By preventing these invasive promotions from disrupting their customers’ journey, leading online brands worldwide are improving their conversion rates by between 2% and 5%. In fact, after eliminating these disruptions, Build.com saw their conversion rate rise by 2.36%, premium travel accessories brand TUMI saw their conversion rate rise by 2.27%, and UGG and Teva brands by Deckers achieved a conversion rate uplift of 2.43% and 1.78% respectively.

As the leader in Customer Journey Hijacking prevention, Namogoo is equipping eCommerce executives with the tools and insights they need to take back control of their customers’ journey and achieve their KPI targets faster and more efficiently.

How many of your site visitors are impacted by invasive ads? And how much do you stand to gain by preventing Customer Journey Hijacking? You can view a clear snapshot of Customer Journey Hijacking within your store by getting a free website analysis.