E-Commerce retailers may be unaware of a growing threat to their business: the presence of invasive product and promotional ads appearing on their web sites that potentially distract shoppers — or even divert them to competitors, resulting in missed revenue opportunities. When Samsonite discovered that 18.9% of its site visitors were exposed to these unauthorized injected ads, it turned to a platform dedicated to preventing this type of malware from affecting the customer experience, ultimately helping the company boost conversion rates and develop more robust retargeting campaigns.
After leveraging Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution, Samsonite achieved a 1.8% overall conversion rate uplift for its web site. Removing these unwanted ads from the shopper experience aided the the Samsonite e-Commerce team in discovering its most engaged shoppers, enabling the company to deliver personalized retargeting campaigns to these once-“infected” user segments within Google Shopping. Through the retargeting campaigns, Samsonite increased:
- Conversion rate 3% above the average campaign;
- Click-through rates 7% above the average campaign; and
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 141%.
By protecting its customers’ online journey Samsonite also saw benefits from its retargeted text ads; infected users’ conversion rates were 21.5% higher than in an average campaign.
“When looking deeper into the infected visitors, we found out that they actually spend more time on the web site and are more engaged than the average visitor,” said Jay Nigrelli, VP of eCommerce at Samsonite in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Active online shoppers are more e-Commerce savvy and are likely to download web services and extensions embedded within injected ads. When ad injections were removed from their experience, we saw these shoppers convert at more than 2.5X the rate of site visitors not impacted by these disruptions.”
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How Samsonite Discovered Its ‘Infected’ Online Shoppers And Their ‘Hijacked’ Experiences
The luggage seller first tested the solution in fall 2017, when Namogoo reached out to its TUMI brand’s digital team. When implementing the solution, the Samsonite e-Commerce team saw firsthand how users exposed to injected product ads, banners and pop-ups were being disrupted throughout the intended customer journey.
“It was shocking to see what our site actually looked like from the perspective of an infected visitor,” Nigrelli said. “It was frustrating to see the types of ads they were seeing — some from our direct industry competitors — because our team puts an emphasis on the customer experience. We had to drill down and get a deeper understanding of the issue to assess the impact of these ads on sales funnel metrics.”
With the removal of these “customer journey hijacking” attempts from the online experience, shoppers that frequently visit the Samsonite site have a higher chance of buying more products before exiting the site. Nigrelli and his team also leveraged Google Analytics to verify demographics of shoppers that had “infected” experiences.
Realizing that this insight would enable Samsonite to target a particularly valuable segment of its customer base, the company’s e-Commerce team began focusing its retargeting campaigns specifically on the infected users, while also preventing these shoppers from viewing the invasive product ads.
“We were able to track results directly with our own analytics and understand how our infected population was behaving across the funnel,” Nigrelli said. “This gave us the confidence to use this unique segment in our remarketing efforts.”
Samsonite continuously monitors its e-Commerce experience by blocking ad injections for 95% of its web traffic while monitoring invasive content for the remaining 5%, which serves as the control group. The teams work together to continuously run A/B tests designed to verify that Samsonite is still enjoying significantly higher e-Commerce KPIs as a result of the blocked ads.
