They run more experiments, faster, with Optimizely
DriveTime evaluated several leading experimentation solutions. There was a clear winner. In Warner’s words “It was obvious: [Optimizely] is a great solution, this works for us.”
In a matter of weeks, DriveTime ran its first experiment using Optimizely Web. Golina attests, “It was a very short amount of time to get a brand new platform up and running and something that's adding so much value.”
Their early homepage experiments optimized DriveTime car search and the loan approval process. At the time, the homepage featured so much information that it was negatively impacting customer acquisition and conversion.
“We thought we were doing the right thing by telling customers about all the products they could buy with their car, how long DriveTime has been around, our philosophy as a company,” says Golina. “One of our early experiments was to remove all of that information from the mobile view. You couldn’t even scroll on the homepage, it was just: here's three things you can do. There was a lot of apprehension around that. The entire team was like, this can't win.”
To the team’s surprise, the new variation of the homepage drove a 20% jump in CTA click conversions. The shorter home page simplified the user flow through the entire DriveTime site. Tassinari explains that “By using the data from the Optimizely experiments in conjunction with internal analytics tools, we were able to follow customers from conversion all the way through the sale.That’s what ultimately got us comfortable to deploy the shorter homepage to 100% traffic—being able to measure [the winning variation] all the way through.”
A few months later, DriveTime noticed that high-tier inventory was sitting on their car lots for twice as long as the average vehicle. Through a series of experiments, DriveTime identified how many of these vehicles they needed to showcase on the website to optimize in-store sales.
Tassinari shares, “The big lesson for us was, yes, we need to be in tune with operations, and take into account the requirements of their supply chains to run end-user tests and let the data help us decide what we do.”
The inventory test was one example of the increasingly complex experiments the team was implementing with Optimizely Web. “It took a lot of effort to get that up and running,” says DriveTime developer, Maddie Reichman. “We asked ourselves: how complex are we planning on getting with these experiments? And the answer was: this is just the beginning.” They needed a better way for engineering to test deep in their products and tech stack.