With the online audiences becoming increasingly fractured across multiple devices, such as desktops, laptops, smartphone sand tablet, how can you best ensure user’s are getting the best experience no matter how they access content and campaigns? Using a recent Time magazine case study as an example, Mark Boniface, Project Director, Jellyfish, looks at how best to optimise user experience and maximise conversion across multiple devices, both desktop and mobile devices.
Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices to access the internet and to make purchases. The relationship between higher end devices such as iPads is also linked with users who have higher disposable incomes, therefore delivering a great user experience to users who have disposable funds and a higher propensity to buy or subscribe is an obvious step towards increasing conversion, especially for products or subscriptions that are targeting the mobile or tablet audience.
Time magazine, an existing paid search client of ours, approached us in relation to their Time Magazine ‘All Access’ subscription which offers their iconic publication in digital format for iPad/ tablet.
Jellyfish formed a digital strategy for this opportunity which was based around how best to optimise user experience and maximise conversion across multiple devices, both desktop and mobile/tablet. We created an innovative yet simple campaign site which communicated the value and benefits of the product offering and delivered a great user experience. This gave users across differing devices a bespoke user interface to maximise conversion rate and was supported by banner campaigns on the Google display network to drive traffic. The banners were also used across the Time.com and Cnn.fortune properties to drive traffic from millions of impressions from visitors to these highly prestigious web properties.
The project offered us the creative opportunity to use the Time.com brand guidelines as a basis and to develop a style of campaign site that had real consistency in terms of ease of use and with the banner campaign. The smartphone version included a tailored interface designed to facilitate the use of a small format touchscreen. It facilitates conversion by using a vertical scrollable structure, all based on the standard website structure, reorganised with innovative responsive style sheets with larger scale finger friendly fields and interaction points.
This campaign site also gave us visibility of the differing user experiences of the device variants. Our analytical data gave us the insight to review key drop off points as they became apparent and remove them to maximise conversion.
The technical difficulties of this process were based mostly around the need to undertake significant testing across multiple devices with varying versions of operating system software and device firmware. On-going enhancement was also essential to ensure that users on lower bandwidth mobile devices would have a good user experience by delivering higher compression/ smaller form factor graphics to reduce load times on slower network connections.
Marketeers need to exploit the opportunity of the modern array of mobile devices. The number of mobile transactions and subscriptions is increasing exponentially, having the tools to take advantage of this and to maximise conversion and analyse results should be part of the armoury of any online marketing company.
By Mark Boniface
Project Director
Jellyfish
