Customer Story: Smarter Travel
For Smarter Travel, Speed Wins
Overview:
CUSTOMER:
TRAVEL COMPANY OPTIMIZES TO DOUBLE REVENUE IN FIRST
MONTH OF TESTING
Smarter Travel is a TripAdvisor company that owns and operates several
WEBSITE:
leading online consumer travel brands, including BookingBuddy,
www.bookingbuddy.com
AirfareWatchdog, and more.
ABOUT: Smarter Travel, a
TripAdvisor company, owns
SPEED WINS
properties, including BookingBuddy.com.
and operates several leading
His team recently noticed a problem with
online consumer travel brands,
“There’s a sign on my door: speed wins.
one of BookingBuddy.com’s most
It’s the informal internal motto and was
including BookingBuddy.com.
important landing pages. The page,
handwritten by me 10 years ago and as the
Through each brand’s site,
a primary entry point to the site, was
office has moved so has the sign.”
designed to increase the number of
– Stephen Kaufer, Founder and CEO,
people that get to the main monetization
TripAdvisor
page in BookingBuddy’s customer funnel.
For Smarter Travel, a TripAdvisor
However, Tony found that a significant
company, Optimizely plays perfectly into
percentage of visitors landing on that
purchases.
their company motto: Speed wins.
page were not converting.
GOAL: Optimize BookingBuddy's
Within the first month of implementing
Tony’s team set out to run a series of tests
Optimizely, the Smarter Travel team was
to increase engagement on the page,
able to run a total of 8 experiments, which
getting more visitors to fill out the page’s
monetization.
resulted in a substantial increase in
search form and then run a search.
TEST: A series of tests iterated
revenue. Today, the team runs, on average,
“We thought we could get a lot more out
a total of 30 campaigns per month.
of this page if we made some changes,
One of the most important ingredients
to a successful optimization program
is velocity – the ability to test, gather
consumers are provided with the
information and tools necessary
to help them make better
decisions about travel
entry-point landing page to
improve search conversions and
on the page's user experience
and design.
but couldn’t get it on development
RESULTS: The winning variation
team’s radar due to other big projects,”
doubled entry-point revenue in
explains Tony. So he turned to Optimizely
just one month.
to speed up the process.
data, put that data into action, and
personalize experiences quickly. Velocity
in optimization gets successful
companies like Smarter Travel from point
A to point B much more quickly,
generating long-term gains and bookings,
and decreasing monthly cost per
It’s awesome to use Optimizely
because we’re able to move so fast. If
I had run these experiments through
my dev queue it would have taken a
campaign.
month just to run the first test!
CHALLENGE: LOW SEARCH
CONVERSIONS
TONY HAENN
SR. PRODUCT MANAGER, SMARTER TRAVEL MEDIA LLC
Tony Haenn is a Product Manager
at Smarter Travel who oversees the
performance of key monetization funnels
for many of the company’s online
631 Howard St. Suite 100 San Francisco, CA 94105
[email protected]
(800) 252-9480
TOP: The original landing page displayed a modal with the headline, “Save Big on Your Trip.”
BOTTOM: The optimized page featured partner logos, a background image, and a new headline.
ITERATIVE TESTING
Tony decided to run a series of tests on
the page to see if changes to the user
direction and helped inform the following
BookingBuddy.com's entry-point landing
tests as well, providing valuable insights
page. With a higher performing page, Tony
about users’ preferences along the way.
and his team were able to invest more of
experience and design would drive more
Tony ultimately ran eight total tests on the
visitors to fill out the search form. He
landing page over the course of just one
tested 10 different headlines to see which
month, amounting to an incredible impact
performed best. He tested adding partner
on the the company’s bottom line revenue.
logos to the page. He also tested various
background images, call-to-action button
text, and form fields.
Each test moved the page in the right
RESULTS
The series of tests increased the
revenue per visit generated from
their marketing budget into sending traffic
to that page through display ads. With
more traffic hitting a better performing
page, the results snowballed.
TESTING TAKEAWAYS
ABOUT OPTIMIZELY:
SPEED WINS: Getting up-and-running fast was key to Smarter Travel's testing and
Optimizely is a world-class
personalization success – and was made easy with Optimizely. From day one, Tony and
website optimization platform
his team were able to build and run multiple optimization and personalization
that enables users with and
campaigns on a weekly basis. After evangelizing Optimizely to the rest of the product
without technical expertise to
team and getting everyone trained on the product, they quickly moved from 2-3
make dynamic changes to their
campaigns per week to 5-6 campaigns per week, in just their first month. Today, they
average 30 testing and personalization campaigns per month.
websites, test the variations to
live traffic, gather immediate
TEST ITERATIVELY FOR GREATEST IMPACT: Rather than taking a “one and done” approach,
results and start achieving
Tony tested multiple elements of the BookingBuddy.com landing page to drive the
goals.
greatest impact. “There’s a lot of opportunity to test,” explains Tony. “Even with a simple
page! We focused on key elements that we hypothesized would drive the most impact.”
Optimizely helps more than
8,000 clients drive more leads,
sales and conversions through
simple website testing and
See Optimizely in action. Schedule a demo today.
www.optimizely.com/demo
optimization.
BY THE NUMBERS:
(As of Nov. 2014)
6.5 billion+
visitors tested across all customer
websites
500,000+
experiments run since launch
8,000+
customers
HAPPY CUSTOMERS: