DPG Media x Contentsquare

How DPG Media used Contentsquare to increase their A/B test win rate by 22%

The Company

DPG Media Group is one of Europe's largest media companies, operating in the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark. The company carries over 80 different brands in television, radio, newspaper, magazines and online services and serves over 15 million viewers, readers, and listeners daily.

The Challenge

Understanding exactly what consumers want—and giving it to them—is paramount to success. For companies like DPG Media, this entails delivering highly engaging content in the most user-friendly, customer-centric way. With fierce competition for attention across various media platforms, media organizations must offer frictionless customer journeys to retain audience engagement and turn consumers into subscribers.

The experimentation team at DPG Media is focused on testing optimizations to provide the best possible customer experience and drive conversions for the different media brands of the group. As a significant amount of developer capacities and resources are allocated to testing, increasing the efficiency and win rate of their A/B testing efforts is a key priority for the team.

Contentsquare enables the team to:

Conduct detailed site analysis prior to the tests, resulting in better hypotheses
Quickly analyze changes during the tests using side-by-side Zoning Analysis
Get in-depth insights into test results to better understand these and fuel the new round of tests

The Solution

Before implementing Contentsquare, the team relied on web analytics from Snowplow. They lacked comprehensive insights into customer behavior, making it difficult or sometimes even impossible to understand why A/B tests failed.

With Contentsquare, the team can strategize and prioritize tests effectively, resulting in a significant boost of 22% to their A/B test win rates.

Using the Triple Diamond Framework

The DPG team relies on the Triple Diamond Framework for effective problem-solving, which comprises three phases.

Firstly, the problem discovery phase serves to understand the root causes of issues and identify the right problems to address. Here, Contentsquare assists the team in uncovering friction points, errors and significant user behaviors on the website, helping with issue prioritization based on impact. In the solution discovery phase, the team formulates hypotheses for potential solutions based on previous analyses.

Finally, in the prototype or go live phase, prototypes undergo A/B testing on the page, with performance closely monitored through Contentsquare's side-by-side Zoning Analysis. Once the winning version is implemented, Contentsquare continues to be instrumental in analyzing ongoing performance.

Improving conversions on their subscription page using A/B testing

Getting visitors to sign up for subscriptions is a key conversion goal for DPG Media, so driving visitors from main content pages, such as newspaper articles, to subscription pages is an important opportunity to convert them.

The DPG Media experimentation team decided to investigate how people signed up for subscriptions on the website of the Dutch morning paper "de Volkskrant." They specifically focused on one user segment: users who clicked on ads placed on the website to promote their own subscription packages. The team analyzed how those users were behaving on the subscription page to uncover optimization potential.

Traffic analysis showed that the majority of ad users accessed the site via mobile devices, yet their conversion rates lagged behind those of desktop users. Diving deeper into the user journey with Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis,the team found that while the ads drove significant traffic to the subscription page, 79% of visitors exited the page, and only 8% of users progressed to the checkout, resulting in a low conversion rate.

Using the Page Comparator tool, the team compared the behavior of ad users with that of other visitors on the subscription page. Their analysis revealed that ad users scrolled less, spent 60% less time on the page, had higher exit rates, and saw significantly lower conversion rates. With the help of Zone-Based Heatmaps, they uncovered that physical newspaper subscriptions were positioned at the top of the page, overshadowing digital subscription offerings placed further down.

This uncovered various issues potentially leading to those negative findings:

The majority of ad users are mobile, so digital subscriptions might be naturally more interesting for them. But since ad users tend not to scroll far on the page, many of them may not even see the digital subscription offers.
The ads on the website promote the low price of the basic digital subscription. When landing on the page, users are first presented with a more expensive paper subscription, with the advertised price located only at the bottom of the page.

DPG Media has a strategic objective to serve customers through digital channels as much as possible, but the friction points uncovered on the subscription page turned out to be a significant driver of calls into the contact center. The Zoning Analysis also revealed that ad users were more likely to contact customer support, with click rates on the contact button spiking to 12 times higher than those of other users.

These findings collectively suggested that users clicking on subscription ads were confused, as they were met with more expensive and irrelevant paper subscriptions above the fold.

Based on these insights, the team conducted an A/B test. They reorganized the product blocks to prioritize digital subscriptions at the top of the page, with the aim of reducing dropouts and increasing conversion rates.

When coming up with solutions to problems, I encourage my team to use the Triple Diamond Framework which consists of 3 steps: problem discovery, solution discovery and prototype or go-live. Contentsquare is crucial in all phases as it allows us to really understand the problem, hypothesize potential solutions and thoroughly analyze user behavior across testing variations with greater depth than ever before. Plus, I believe it has significantly enhanced our learning process regarding experiment variations in user behavior, making it ten times better for us."

Joshua Kreuger

Manager Experimentation, Subscription Sales
DPG Media

With Contentsquare's support, DPG Media now conducts more informed A/B tests, boasting a 22% higher win rate compared to tests without prior analysis.

By leveraging Contentsquare to uncover relevant insights before conducting A/B tests, DPG Media has maximized the efficiency of their testing processes, optimizing internal resources for greater effectiveness.

The Results

The A/B test turned out successful, confirming the team's hypothesis. Conversions on newspaper subscriptions increased by 6.6%, translating to a 7% increase in revenue. Similarly, magazine subscriptions saw an uptick of 8.7%, resulting in a 2% revenue boost. The actionable insights provided by Contentsquare played an important role in validating these strategic changes internally. For a traditional media company like DPG Media, prioritizing digital subscriptions over newspaper offerings marked a significant leap forward.

Thanks to Contentsquare, we were able to streamline our A/B testing processes, increasing efficiency and ensuring that our web optimization strategies are backed by data-driven decision-making."