HERO STORIES. GREAT WOLF LODGE X CONTENTSQUARE

How Great Wolf Lodge increased revenue per visitor by 20% with a CX-driven page redesign

Company

Great Wolf Lodge operates North America’s largest group of indoor waterparks, offering uniquely designed resorts filled with family-friendly activities and attractions.

With 80% of sales coming from web channels, digital customer experience is a major priority for Great Wolf Lodge. By analyzing customer behavior on the Suites section of their website, Great Wolf Lodge recognized an opportunity to improve guests' booking experience. Visitors needed an easier way to explore the different types of lodging available, including the unique features and key differences between the Standard, Themes and Premium lodging options. Great Wolf Lodge set out to redesign the Suites page to enable guests to research their room options as easily and seamlessly as possible.

Key Metrics

20% increase in conversion for all suite pages

20% increase in revenue per visitor on the suite pages

Challenge

The Suites section of the website navigation only allowed a visitor to view one type of room type at a time. To compare room options, visitors had to click back and forth between different Suites pages multiple times.

Great Wolf Lodge hypothesized that the poor navigation setup was forcing visitors to click more and explore less, causing lower conversions and revenue per visitor metrics.

With the new UX launched, the team used Contentsquare to analyze performance for 28 days. They validated their hypothesis with several advanced behavioral insights, such as:

  • Zone-Based Heatmaps showed that visitors were using the new sub-navigation and clicking between the Suites card options, as desired.

  • Customer Journey Analysis showed that visitors who first landed on the newly designed Standard Suites page were much more likely to click on and explore the other Suites options.

  • Page Comparator showed an increase in activity and income-assisted conversion rates from visitors toggling between the three Suites options. 

Solution

To validate this hypothesis, Great Wolf Lodge turned to Contentsquare to get more detailed data and insights to inform the redesign initiative. Using Contentsquare Customer Journey Analysis, they found that many users were clicking on one category in the Suites navigation and then exiting, without comparing different room options. This suggested user frustration and meant Great Wolf Lodge was losing potential bookings and revenue from visitors who were unable to easily compare the various offers.  

So the product and UX teams at Great Wolf Lodge collaborated to create a new design that educated visitors on the different Suites available, while enabling guests to explore and navigate between their different options. 

Based on Contentsquare insights, they consolidated the Suites options onto cards, updating the card layout to feature icons that displayed key features at a glance. This made it much easier for guests to toggle between the different options and compare offers.

"
The greatest benefit of Contentsquare is being able to see the conversion rate for each page instead of just having one conversion rate for the whole site. This made it easy to see which pages had the highest conversion and biggest impact on revenue."

Axelle Brand

Director of Digital Product & Strategy
Great Wolf Lodge

Results

The Suites redesign was a success. The added sub-navigation to the Suites pages improved the user experience, decreased confusion on the Suites offerings, decreased exit rates for visitors that have clicked through to the booking engine and improved the pages’ load times. 

The redesign increased the revenue per visitor by making it easier to upsell guests on the Themes and Premium Suites since they were more visible and easy to access. Great Wolf Lodge estimated that if this redesign was implemented a year earlier, it could have increased incremental revenue by 19.6% and conversion rates by 20% for users who visited the Suites pages of the website.

By condensing key information and content into at-a-glance cards, plus adding a sub-navigation, visitors were able to easily explore and toggle between Standard, Themes and Premium options. This led to visitors spending more time on the site, higher conversion rates and more revenue per visitor.