Bringing advanced athletic shoe technology to equestrian riding and authentic Western boots, Ariat is a leading manufacturer of performance footwear distributed through a network of retail outlets in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Japan.
The Problem: Unwanted Ad Injections Mar Ariat’s Customer Journey
20.14% Interruption Rate
Enhancing the omnichannel journey for their online customers is a top priority for Ariat’s eCommerce team, but the journey for many of these shoppers was being cut short by unauthorized ads injected into consumer web sessions that interrupted visitors with competitor promotions and lured them away to purchase elsewhere, driving their conversion rate down and damaging their revenue. Traffic interrupters discreetly insert these ad injections into consumer browsers and devices, enabling them to profit by redirecting visitors to other sites without enterprises knowing it.
When connecting with Namogoo, Ariat’s VP eCommerce, Matt Burchard, knew about ad injections but was unsure as to how many shoppers visiting Ariat.com were being met with these ad injections.
“We were familiar with ad injections but I didn’t know how widespread it was at Ariat. We discovered it was affecting 18% of our visitors when we first implemented Namogoo, and now it is 20% – that’s high.”
The Solution: Giving Customer Journey Interruptions the Boot with Namogoo
While testing Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution, Ariat’s eCommerce team was able to see the types of injected ads appearing to their site visitors, including those coming from affiliate partners.
One of the more shocking things they discovered during the Namogoo demo was not just the presence of their large retail partners, but that these ads weren’t initiated by them. They were coming from affiliates, and this was especially problematic because they had no controls in place to mitigate interruptions and realized this problem wasn’t going away.
Seeing the scale and impact of these unsanctioned promotions on their key KPIs and brand equity was something that Matthew and the Ariat team could now allow to continue.
Specifically, Revenue Per Visitor is their key KPI; it’s the metric they’re entirely responsible for from a P&L standpoint. Yet, the effect of journey interruptions on Ariat’s brand was equally if not more concerning. Users coming to their platform to discover their products and what they stand for were getting interrupted. They knew it would lead to brand dilution and wanted to prevent it from happening.
To verify the impact of Namogoo’s real-time blocking of ad injections, Ariat was able to validate all results using their own Google Analytics platform.
“The Namogoo testing was transparent, one of the better testings we’ve done with any vendor. We were able to validate results through our own analytics, which brought us some peace of mind. Namogoo is really on par with Google, Facebook, and other vendors with which we do incrementality tests. Namogoo is even more efficient in certain factors.”
The Business Impact: Revenue Per Visit & Conversion Rates Rise When Interruptions are Blocked
With Namogoo preventing journey interruptions from undermining their customer journey and diverting them away to other offers, Ariat is consistently seeing their Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) lift by 3.52%, while their overall conversion rate is up by 2.79%.
“We ran tests to measure revenue from interrupted customers versus our other visitors — the proof was in the pudding! The fact that we can quantify the value we’re getting out of Namogoo, let our CFO get into the numbers, and understand the incremental return, makes it that much easier to verify the value we’re gaining from preventing these interruptions.”
While the team is delighted to see these eCommerce funnel improvements, they were also enlightened when the data showed that conversion rates for interrupted visitors were far higher than those who were not affected by ad injections. These visitors are engaged online and therefore more likely to download free extensions, apps, and desktop software that are embedded with ad injections.
“The 20% of our visitors whose journeys were interrupted represent a higher percentage of our revenue. They get interrupted because they are about to purchase. I get that — if I were an injecting advertiser, I would target them at checkout too. It’s a race to the bottom.”
Conclusion: Strong ROI with Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention Solution
The impact of COVID-19 has made it especially critical for retailers to have solutions that can be implemented remotely and deliver clear and swift ROI. Ariat is pleased to have achieved a significant ROI with Namogoo’s meaningful SaaS-based solution, which can fit with any standard tag management solutions and requires no development or IT resources for setup or maintenance.
“eCommerce vendors are famous for claiming integrations are just one snippet of code, that they won’t be a huge burden on our IT team. This is one of the rare instances where a platform actually lived up to its promise.”
