How Škoda increased test drive visits by +40%

The company

Škoda is one of the oldest car manufacturers in the world and is part of the Volkswagen Group.

The challenge

Test drives are a key stage in the customer car purchase journey. And with most of the pre-purchase research taking place online, Škoda's test drives are increasingly booked online.

Škoda UK provides its online customers with a unique online tool called the Škoda Toolkit, which includes a Car Configurator and Finance Calculator. It's the perfect place for prospective customers to visualize how their dream car might look and feel.

The company wanted to encourage visitors to request a test drive by increasing the number of interactions with ŠKoda’s Toolkit on the website.

Škoda UK wanted to understand

• What the most critical areas of the website creating navigation barriers for customers were

• Where the biggest opportunity for improvement was

• What types of interactions had the highest correlation with booking a test drive

The digital team turned to the global marketing agency Merkel and Contentsquare's Experience Intelligence platform to help optimize their customer experience and increase the number of test drives booked on their website.

The solution

At the beginning of the project, the Merkle team built a measurement framework for Škoda—a visual map of metrics that were critical to Škoda’s success.

The visualization allowed Merkle's analysts, working closely with Škoda’s digital transformation team, to translate their business objectives into web analytics metrics and prioritize optimization based on the performance of these data points.

As one of Contentsquare’s partners, Merkle supported the digital transformation team to champion the use of Contentsquare's platform in investigating the challenge they were confronted with.

Analysis in both Google Analytics and Contentsquare uncovered the following customer problems:

• Users didn't have clear next steps when interacting with the new car pages

• Users displayed looping behaviors between pages, which is a sign of confusion

• Users were abandoning journeys due to distractions on the pages

Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability showed users were looping back and forth between the homepage and the new cars page, which suggested they were struggling to find key information and weren’t able to navigate the UK site easily.

The click rate metric in Contentsquare's Heatmaps capability revealed that very few users were clicking the Toolkit (pictured), hidden at the bottom of the homepage, leading to a lack of clarity in the user’s journey

Exposure rate showing only 19.6% of users reaching the Toolkit at the bottom of the page (blue)

The results

These insights led the team to highlight the visibility of the toolkit by implementing a 'sticky tools' navigation on the right side of the page (in green).

This change, based on actionable insights found with Contentsquare and Google Analytics, drove

• +40% increase in test drive visits

• +10% increase in visits to the Finance Calculator

• +12% visits to 'Find a Retailer' and +3% to 'Car Configurator' pages

By using the right data to understand different customer problems and designing solutions that aim to solve them, the digital team has seen tangible results with a real impact on Škoda’s bottom line—test drive visits have been significantly boosted.

What's next

As the Merkle team tests further hypotheses with Škoda, the plan is to build on these initial successes. They hypothosized that while the sticky navigation is successful in engaging and driving users to explore Škoda's range, the range page was a point of friction for users.

ŠKODA's old range page

So, the team segmented users who visited the range page and analyzed how they navigated through the site. They found a large proportion of users looping from the homepage to the range page and back, without progressing further—confirming their hypothesis.

The time before first click metric in Heatmaps showed users took a long time before interacting with the filters at the top of the page.

Filters at the top of the range page

However, the click rate metric showed that these were among the most attractive elements on the page. This suggested that users were looping and returning to the homepage only after discovering there wasn't enough information to help them click through to a specific car on the range page.

The team has already created new test ideas using this insight, including

• Reordering the sticky navigation bar to highlight the next best action for that particular stage in the user’s journey

• Redesigning the range page to highlight key information more clearly

Merkle, alongside Contentsquare, has been instrumental in helping us establish and then accelerate our conversion rate optimization (CRO) program. They've really opened our eyes in terms of getting the most out of every test and we (the Škoda brand, not just the digital marketing team) are starting to see the benefits coming through. For this test, not only are we now giving customers the right tool options at the right time on their website journey—improving their experience with us and increasing our conversion rates—but we're also helping inform and steer Škoda's global roadmap for website developments.

Chris Whitmore

Digital Transformation Manager