The Challenge: Invasive Ads Harm Viking Direct’s Customer Experience & Revenue
13.85% Hijacking Rate
Since its entrance into the European market in the UK in 1990, Office Depot Europe and its pioneering Viking Direct brands are today active in 30 countries and one of Europe’s largest office supply retailers.
Continuously optimizing their online customer experience is of paramount priority for Head of Operations and DevOps Scott Dunbar and the development team at Office Depot Europe. But it was precisely that experience that was unknowingly being harmed by the growing problem of Customer Journey Hijacking, where unauthorized ads injected into consumer browsers disrupted their online visitors with competitor product ads, pop-ups, banners, and in-text redirects, diverting them away from their brand sites.
Namogoo reached out to Office Depot’s Development Team about how these customer-side injected ads interrupted their eCommerce customers and cut into their bottom line. The team, which work diligently to ensure a superior digital experience on their brand sites, agreed to run a Proof of Value (POV) test on Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution to verify the scale and impact of injected ads on their customer experience and sales funnel.
“I was aware of various forms of journey hijacking at the time, but felt these could be edge case scenarios and that happened very infrequently, so I was quite skeptical at first. What we ended up learning was a real eye-opener.”
The Solution: Namogoo Customer Hijacking Prevention Protects Viking Direct’s Customers & Sales Funnel
The Office Depot team decided to run the POV testing process on Viking Direct’s German domain, www.viking.de, their largest and highest-performing website. They were able to view the variety of unsanctioned ads that their online customers were being exposed to, and they were particularly surprised to discover pop-ups of their own products covering their site and driving traffic to affiliate links.
“We discovered pop-ups for Office Depot products in customer sessions. They were often misleading or incorrect and impacted the entire customer experience. I found it very disturbing that we managed to compete against ourselves and were paying money to negatively impact our customer experience and revenue.”
97% of the unauthorized ads that visitors to www.viking.de customers were exposed to were promotions linking to competitor brands and offers.
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.
The Office Depot team were pleased at the simplicity with which they could verify the business impact of blocking invasive ads from their customer experience.
“It was extremely easy and straightforward and the time invested was absolutely minimal, Namogoo provided us with the data we needed during the POV process and all our meetings.”
The Business Impact: Viking Direct Vanquishes Customer Hijacking & Enhances its Bottom Line
As the POV test results reached statistical significance, the Office Depot team were pleased to achieve a 3.4% overall conversion rate uplift.
“The great thing with Namogoo is it’s very easy to see in black and white exactly what you’re getting for your investment. Being able to measure our conversion rate uplift and other metrics translates directly to revenue protected, and revenue earned for the business. For us, it’s a solution that pays for itself very quickly.”
For Scott, the results validated Namogoo’s unique approach to preserving the customer experience Office Depot works so diligently to deliver.
“Namogoo’s solution gave us visibility into what our eCommerce platform looked like from the customer-side perspective. It has to be up there near the top of our vendor services. Within 3 months, Namogoo already paid for itself for an entire year of service.”
Conclusion
10 months on from the POV period, the Office Depot team continuously monitors the value of Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution by blocking injected ads for 97% of their web traffic while monitoring invasive content for the remaining 3%. This allows the team to benchmark the relative conversion rate uplift delivered. This proven consistent value has led Office Depot to roll out Namogoo’s solution to all of their Viking Direct brand sites across Europe.
“Once we were able to verify the solution essentially paid for itself, the decision to protect as many sites as possible was a no brainer because we are reaping the benefits from all of our customers in all of those geographies.”
