Sound United

Sound United is the parent company of popular audio devices. The work for this project focused on three of their brands, Denon and Polk. The objective of this goal was to run A/B experiments on their websites with one of two goals in mind: improving the UI or improving the conversion journey.

The client only requested I do A/B testing on the software, nothing was to be done on their live websites. Determining the feasibility of experiments from their repository proved to be tricky at times. The main reason had to do with if it was compatible with the A/B testing software or could only be implemented in their CMS which at that point would be out of scope for me.

Part of the challenge was that some of the experiments requested, could not be done in the A/B testing software due to the fact the experiment dealt with dynamic data from the CMS. Those experiments had to be noted and reported to the client urgently to get a different one in its place. Sometimes it was difficult to determine the feasibility of the experiment until it was well underway.

Communication was clear between myself and the client to ensure smooth implementations of the experiments. For the most part, the experiments that did get tested netted valuable data at the end of the completion period. Most of them got a decisive A “winner” or B “winner” that then allowed the client to pass that information to their in house development team for deployment to production.

My knowledge in web development lead to quick implementation of experiments. The majority of time, I was actually testing the tests. I had to make sure the website didn’t break elsewhere due to my implementation, it worked on all browsers, and it worked on all screen sizes (applicable to the experiment). That is why I had to maintain clear communication because sometimes the client would want to move deadlines up which could have sacrificed the quality of the experiment so I had to be direct the instances that came up.

Due to the time period these tests were on-going, the brands noticed positive growth in traffic and conversions while enjoying a modest decline in bounce rates. It should be noted some of the tests occurred during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday portion of the year, but there were tests being implemented before and after that contributed to their results.

With the client’s CRO strategy, they overall had a productive holiday shopping season. They also had the gift of knowledge of what works for to improve their website’s conversion rates.