The Problem: Injected Competitors Ads Stand in the Way of the Optimal Journey
22.83% Hijacking Rate
Eddie Bauer is an outdoor brand offering performance outerwear, apparel, footwear, accessories, and gear. For 100 years, Eddie Bauer has been inspiring and enabling people to live their adventure. Eddie Bauer products are built to last and are available online at https://www.eddiebauer.com, and at more than 400 stores in the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, and other international markets.
Creating seamless customer journeys is a top priority for Eddie Bauer’s digital commerce team in their efforts to grow revenue and loyalty with both new and existing online customers.
However, for many of their online customers, the customer journeys they built were being disrupted by Customer Journey Hijacking—a widespread problem where unauthorized ads are injected into consumer devices and browsers. These unsanctioned promotions lured Eddie Bauer’s visitors to direct competitor sites and offers, 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. Discreetly accessing the consumer’s device or browser directly allows these companies to funnel customers away without enterprises even knowing it.
When Namogoo connected with Steve Nicholas, Eddie Bauer’s Director, Digital Commerce, they had heard about injected ads targeting online shoppers, but less certain as to just how prevalent this problem was amongst visitors to their brand site.
“We thought Customer Journey Hijacking might be taking place on our eCommerce platform, but to such a problematic extent — that was news to us. We were embarking on a full-on website redesign project at the time, and the last thing we wanted after such a major investment was seeing our beautiful, new, modern designs trumped by these unwanted ads.”
Wanting to uncover the true scale and impact of injected ads on their customer journey and online KPIs, the team at Eddie Bauer conducted an A/B test with Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention solution.
The Solution: Preventing Customer Journey Hijacking & Clearing the Path to Purchase
While testing Namogoo’s solution, the digital commerce team discovered that 22.83% of all visitors’ sessions on Eddiebauer.com were being exposed to unauthorized ad injections, often designed to lure them to other online stores.
“Upwards of 25% of all visitors depending on the specific website and the day, were seeing unwanted ads — that was pretty eye-opening! We found ads and coupons for competing sites with similar products and even some existing wholesale partners being displayed right over top of our website in the middle of the screen.”
Being able to see from their customers’ point of view the variety of clever tactics traffic hijackers were using to divert them away from Eddie Bauer’s customer journey was especially frustrating given how much Steve and the digital team invest into creating a positive customer experience.
The team was able to track customer journey data and measure KPI performance with Namogoo’s solution dashboard and verify all results with their own analytics platform.
“We appreciated just how easy it was implementing our tag management system with Namogoo. Their team worked very closely with us and they were fully transparent in sharing their data. It was very open – we could look at both sets of results and double check that everything was in sync.”
The Business Impact: Conversion Rates Ascend with Disruption-Free Customer Journeys
With Namogoo’s Customer Hijacking Prevention identifying and blocking injected competitor ads in real time, Eddie Bauer’s conversion took an immediate upturn. Over the two plus years after originally partnering with Namogoo, they have been seeing consistent results and an overall conversion rate uplift of 3.82%. Results are continually monitored with a 99/1 split and holdout test.
Beyond the improvements to their sales funnel, the data helped Eddie Bauer discover the immense value of their hijacked visitors’ segment. These visitors are more active online and therefore more frequently download free extensions, apps, and desktop software that are embedded with ad injections.
“It definitely seemed logical that hijacked visitors are more avid online shoppers, and the data confirmed that our hijacked visitors were some of our most loyal Eddie Bauer customers and most frequent shoppers. We’re looking to explore this segment further and test it in some of our ad programs going forward.”
Conclusion
Always evaluating new solutions to drive their customer journeys forward, the results being achieved with Namogoo’s SaaS-based solution stand out to the Eddie Bauer team: The team was excited at the outcome and felt vindicated that the hard work devoted to perfecting their customer journey was shining through after eliminating these unauthorized and obtrusive disruptions.
