A Digital Case Study: Leading Telco in Africa

Whether you are a small start-up, or a big multi-national organisation, it is important that you understand the importance of your digital properties in your online marketing initiatives. Each digital property should be driven by a set of business objectives.

Multi-national organisations often have multiple digital properties across different markets. Managing and understanding each of these digital properties, how they are utilised by your consumers and how they impact your business is not a trivial task. This problem is further compounded by inter-dependencies between digital properties that might also try to cross- and up-sell to consumers.

Background To The Problem

A leading telecommunications service provider in Africa was experiencing a consistent drop in traffic and sales on of their key ecommerce-driven digital properties. Despite the fact that they increased marketing spend across various digital channels and that their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were on target, their initiatives did not diagnose the problem. After an extensive re-examination of all their digital endeavors, they were still not able to diagnose and resolve the problem, prompting them to seek external help

Understanding The Client’s Digital Landscape

In order to perform an advanced diagnostic analysis on the digital property in question, we first started off with performing a mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive descriptive analysis of the telco’s digital properties within the specific market. Utilising a fundamental web analysis platform such as Google Analytics enabled us to quickly create an understanding of typical consumer interaction with their different digital properties. The basis was set.

We then took this fundamental understanding and applied our collective knowledge of the digital space to start the data and insight exploration process, keeping an eye out for any potential hypothesis that could be the root cause of their declining ecommerce platform.

Establishing The Hypothesis

During the exploratory process, we noticed that the specific digital property in question had a predominantly mobile consumer base, but the data told a grim picture. Over the past couple of months, the mobile visitors to the ecommerce site had gradually declined. We segment the data in order to create a mobile versus desktop view. This lead us to hypothesise that the issues was mobile related, as the desktop performance had been consistent for the past couple months.

Interrogating The Data: Extracting Insights

We hypothesised that the declining performance of the digital property was as a direct result of the mobile performance, and as such, used this hypothesis to start our diagnostic analysis. We were geared up, passionate and eager to find the root cause of the issue!

After interrogating the data into multiple different views and segments, a user-behaviour analysis hinted towards a problem during the user journey and user experience. Our data driven insights approach revealed that the telco implemented a change in the user journey a couple of months ago which ended up being problematic for consumers.

We proceeded to test the findings by traversing through the user journey on multiple devices, taking a data-lead approach. This revealed that an additional modal/pop-up page was implemented for mobile device only, which confused consumers. Upon wanting to visit the ecommerce digital property, consumers would search for it, find it and proceed to click on the link to the digital property. This did not take them to the intended ecommerce website.

Instead, consumers were provided with a screen which asked them to select which telco-related property they wanted to visit, with now clear Call To Action (CTA) to enable the consumer to reach the ecommerce website. Instead, users left and tried the same process again. Eventually, with time, consumers were not able to easily find the digital property in question and decided to not search for and visit it again.

Actionable Insights: Solving The Problem

Backed by the data, diagnostic analysis and our hypothesis, we reverted back to the telco with our findings. It was proposed that the pop-up page which had been implemented be removed and that mobile traffic be directed directly to the relevant site which was being searched for by the consumers.

The Results

The ecommerce digital property ended up dramatically improving across various KPIs. Our endeavours had the following impact:

  • Traffic to the digital platform increase by over 600%
  • Organic search increased dramatically to the ecommerce digital property
  • The Bounce Rate on linked digital properties decreased, as consumers found the correct site they were searching for and could navigate to it
  • Overall, sales conversions increased, so much so that the telco reported an almost 300% increase in revenue the following month after the changes were made – and it is still rising!
  • Most importantly, we had one happy client.

Conclusion

Sometimes the simplest of changes to a digital property can have a dramatic impact and a cascading effect on linked digital properties. The key is to keep track of changes which are made, and more importantly, to continually analyse how the digital property is performing.

Always ensure that you can trust your data. Without the correct data and a capable team of analyst, it can become challenging to properly identify and diagnose problems.

Most importantly, be curious when exploring a problem and don’t forget to back it with data driven actionable insights.

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