6 Sep 2012: Lastminute.com, the UK’s leading online travel and leisure retailer, has implemented Optimize and Segments from Webtrends across three of its major global brand websites: lastminute.com, Holiday Autos and ZUJI (part of the Travelocity Group).

In today’s competitive online travel market, understanding customer behaviour is critical. Analytics and multi-variant testing was already part of lastminute.com’s digital marketing and product strategy to test website content. However, the brand wanted to enhance this by implementing an optimisation solution to obtain deeper insight into customer preferences. The ultimate goal was to provide its users with the best possible experience across its sites by fully understanding visitor behaviours and inclinations.

Rather than looking for a software vendor, lastminute.com it specifically wanted a technology partner to work closely with its team to advise on which sections of the site to test, and to formulate creative plans to understand customer behaviour. Following a full marketplace evaluation, Webtrends was selected as the partner of choice. The main factor in this decision was the fully managed service that Webtrends offers, whereby its consultants not only support the testing process but also advise and make recommendations to drive clients’ optimisation strategies and long-term optimisation programmes. Webtrends’ experience within the travel industry made it the perfect choice for lastminute.com’s requirements.

Lastminute.com was also attracted to the integration between Webtrends’ Optimize and Segments, which allows it to test its sites and target users with content based on their individual behaviour. This integration is unique in the marketplace. The retailer will also be using the self-service functionality of Webtrends Visual Editor to design tests itself without the need for external assistance. This will drastically reduce the time-to-test, as well as increase the flexibility for web testing and ad-hoc analysis. 

Karen Mullins, Group Customer Marketing & User Experience Director at lastminute.com, commented: “Understanding the direct revenue and conversion impact of our user experience improvements is vital, and we wanted to move our A/B and MVT testing and targeting strategy to the next level. We chose to work with Webtrends because we wanted a partner that could provide both a hosted and self service platform with a services team to advise on the best areas of our sites to test across all channels – desktop, tablet and mobile. For us, Webtrends has all bases covered plus a strong platform with unique integration that our internal users can easily adopt to deliver a market-leading optimisation strategy.”

Nick Sharp, VP EMEA, Webtrends, added: “The travel industry is incredibly competitive and the customer experience is vital. Optimisation enables businesses to understand customer needs and make changes that will guarantee uplift in conversions. We are working closely with the lastminute.com team to help them build strategies for success based on customer behaviour data, ensuring the websites are optimised and meeting customer expectations.”