The Problem: Unwanted Ads Hijack Carhartt’s Customer Journey
21.08% Hijacking Rate
With a history dating back more than 131 years and a long-proven reputation for workwear apparel designed to take on the most rugged conditions, Carhartt has evolved to serve and protect hardworking people since its founding in 1889.
Attracting a wider audience is also key for Carhartt’s Direct to Consumer team, which constantly tests tools that help enhance the consumer journey and improve conversion.
But these efforts were not reaching a significant portion of their site visitors, who were affected by Customer Journey Hijacking—a widespread problem where unauthorized product ads are injected into consumer devices and browsers. These unsanctioned promotions lured Carhartt’s visitors to other sites, driving their conversion rate down and leaking their revenue. Traffic hijackers profit from bundling these ad injections into browser extensions, apps, and many other free software programs installed by consumers online. The fact that they run on the consumer’s device or browser essentially makes them a blind spot for enterprises and allows traffic hijackers to funnel customers away undetected.
Namogoo notified Anna Cole, Carhartt’s Director of Global D2C Digital Platforms, about the scale and impact of Customer Journey Hijacking. After seeing real screenshot examples of competitor ads that were appearing to their website visitors, Anna and her team wanted to dig deeper and verify the severity of this issue.
“Initially we had a healthy dose of skepticism. We needed to understand if it was really happening along with the scale and impact. After seeing examples of competitor ads appearing to our consumers, we decided to investigate this further with Namogoo.”
The Solution: Taking Customer Journey Hijacking Out of the Online Shopping Journey
Carhartt’s D2C team ran a test with Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution. While reviewing the results, Carhartt discovered that 21.08% of all visitors to Carhartt.com were subjected to unauthorized ads—many of which promoted competitors.
We saw ads offering similar products and categories appearing to our consumers on our site. Like many brands we work hard to bring relevant visitors to our site —We certainly didn’t want to see them taken away by a competitor’s ad. That’s both money and efforts we put into our brand, lost.
In addition to investing money in attracting the right target audience to their site, Carhartt’s D2C team is constantly analyzing activity throughout their sales funnel to make data-driven decisions. Ad injections secretly impact this data on the consumer side, damaging KPIs while distorting analytics.
It doesn’t feel right that advertisers can inject ads on top of our experience. This also meant time spent trying to pinpoint declines in conversion or exit rate. We are very thankful that there is a way to block these disruptions.
The results of preventing Customer Journey Hijacking were also immediately apparent to Carhartt, who saw their overall conversion rate climb while verifying all results with their own analytics platform.
Namogoo’s team was really attentive and made implementing their tag, tracking our journey data, and measuring KPIs with our own analytics easy and straightforward. Because it was our data, it was transparent and made the business case undeniable.
The Business Impact: Carhartt’s Conversion Rate Consistently Looking Up
One year after implementing Namogoo’s solution to Customer Journey Hijacking, Carhartt is consistently increasing its overall conversion rate by 3.23%.
We’ve been really happy to see the conversion lift due to blocking third-party ads from appearing on top of our web experience. Namogoo’s solution has provided one of our strongest conversion lifts, positively impacting our bottom line.
The Carhartt D2C team also discovered a valuable finding when looking at the data — visitors impacted by Customer Journey Hijacking have a higher propensity to purchase and convert at a much higher rate than those unaffected by this phenomenon. These consumers are more active online than average and therefore more frequently download browser extensions and freeware that is bundled with these injections.
It was eye-opening. I wasn’t expecting that segment to convert at a much higher rate. The data clearly shows that these hijacked consumers have a higher purchase intent and end up buying more.
Making the Most of eCommerce During COVID-19
The retail industry has faced unique and prolonged challenges during the current coronavirus pandemic. With more consumers relying on eCommerce than before, removing disruptions from the online buying journey is even more paramount. Preventing Customer Journey Hijacking is making a key difference for Carhartt, which has seen conversion jump by 43% for repeat consumers, and by 67% for new consumers during this period.
Namogoo helps us gain more control and ensure that our consumers actually receive the personalized journey we’ve designed. The results speak to what’s possible when the consumer sees our end-to-end experience without any interruptions.
Conclusion
Carhartt’s team regularly evaluates the returns on D2C investments — many of which demand time and resources to configure and maintain. Namogoo’s SaaS solution allows Carhartt to gain high ROI with minimal resources needed on their side.
Getting a meaningful return from some of our other solutions requires plenty of human capital to run effectively. Looking at effort versus reward, we’re gaining a very high ROI with Namogoo with relatively low efforts on our end.
