Finding opportunities to improve the web experience for USA Rugby’s potential financial supporters
A Web Analytics Case Study
2-minute read
OVERVIEW
Our team of 4 grad students at the Pratt DX Center partnered with USA Rugby to analyze and evaluate their website visitor behavior to gather insight on an important target audience for them — financial supporters. A combination of Google Analytics and Hotjar were used to gather the data that informed our insights and recommendations on this specific user group.
Key findings:
There was a lack of strategic event tracking set up in Google Analytics that hindered our ability to segment true financial supporters from potential financial supporters users — but we were able to pivot and provide a more high level overview for potential financial supporters instead.
Google Analytics showed a lack of mobile device usage for this user group, indicating some missed opportunities for mobile users due to a lack of mobile optimization across the Philanthropy pages.
The website showed unusually slow load times on Chrome browsers, which could be having much more of a negative impact on this particular user group whose preferred browser of choice is Chrome.
A lack of clear labeling for ‘Support/Donate’ pages showed confusion among users in Hotjar session recordings, and could help explain the general lack of interaction with Philanthropy-related pages and links that we discovered.
Our team developed recommendations and design solution mockups to address some of these key findings. Since delivering our evaluation findings to USA Rugby’s key stakeholders on Mar. 25, 2022, they’ve already implemented one of our design recommendations to change the labeling of ‘Support/Donate’ in their global navigation.
7-minute read
BACKGROUND
How can we provide a better web experience for the potential financial supporters?
Timeline:
Jan 28 - Mar 25, 2022
Tools:
Google Analytics; Hotjar; Google Optimize; Figma
Team:
Wuke Zhou, Yuki Shimano, Shih Wen Huang, and myself
My Role:
Analyze data in Google Analytics & Hotjar; develop data visuals in Tableau; create visual infographic in Figma;
Deliverables:
The USA Rugby website serves as the front door for rugby players, fans and financial supporters to access rugby-related information and resources. Their users have a variety of information needs when accessing their website, from members needing resources like insurance claim forms, to fans looking to give donations to their national team. The website also supports USA Rugby in their goals to grow and retain membership, attract people to events, and gain commercial support and partnerships.
Our team used Google Analytics and Hotjar heatmaps and session recordings to gather insights on one of USA Rugby’s target audience groups – financial supporters. The objective for this project was to better understand the behavior of this important user group by looking at their web usage to see where they’re coming from, what sort of content they are interested in and how they are engaging with this content.
Our primary goal was to provide insight to ensure that the potential financial supporters are having a seamless website experience.
OUR PROCESS
Methods of analysis.
We used Google Analytics to review the historical data on USA Rugby’s website users. We chose to review data for an extended time frame from January 2015 (site launch) to end of February 2022 in order to gather a more complete picture of our specific user group.
To dive deeper into usage behavior, we analyzed Hotjar heatmaps of users’ clicks and scrolls, as well as selected session recordings. This analysis looked at a 30 day time period from early February 2022 to early March 2022. *Hotjar was set up at the start of our project, giving us only 30 days of data to analyze.
Analysis was divided between group members — my teammate Wuke and I worked on analyzing Google Analytics data, while Shih Wen and Yuki analyzed the Hotjar heatmaps. Yuki and I worked on reviewing Hotjar session recordings.
Establishing segmentation.
Before starting on any analysis, our first step was establishing how we would define who the financial supporters were in Google Analytics. We decided to define this segment in Google Analytics as users who visited the Philanthropy and/or Partners pages within their browsing session — pages associated with providing some form of financial support to USA Rugby.
Philanthropy pages are where users find more information on donating/providing support to USA Rugby and related teams.
The Partners page is where organizations come to find more information and inquire about sponsorships/partnerships.
Due to a lack of tracking set up in Google Analytics (more on this to come), we could only define the segment based on page visits — not by whether someone actually provided any tangible financial support to USA Rugby. Because of this limitation, we refer to our defined segment throughout as potential financial supporters.
What are we trying to discover?
Our team came together to define 3 primary research questions that helped shape and define the scope of our analysis:
OUR FINDINGS
Who are the potential financial supporters?
While a more in depth demographics-related analysis on the potential financial supporters was performed (see Infographic), here I’ll just be discussing the size of this segment of users.
In total, the Potential Financial Supporters made up 8,269 users — which is just 0.2% of all USA Rugby users.
At such a small percentage of users, this would be considered a micro-segment of USA Rugby’s users, but an important micro-segment nonetheless. Yet, the number of users that have actually provided financial support to USA Rugby is probably even smaller making it difficult to gauge true size. Our struggle in defining this segmentation led to our first (and one of the most important) findings of the analysis.
Finding 1: Lack of strategic data tracking
1.1. A deeper analysis could be done if event tracking were set up
It’s assumed that users that visit the Philanthropy and Partners pages are potentially looking to support USA Rugby financially, but a more accurate assessment could be done if event tracking were set up for important CTAs that would signify more tangible financial support.
Recommendations:
- Add event tracking to any donation form submisson buttons. This way anyone who submits a donation can be segmented as a true financial supporter.
- Create hyperlinks for important email inquiries. The email to inquire about partnerships/sponsorhips can be made a hyperlink so that clicks on the link can be tracked through event tracking.
Where are they coming from?
We uncovered that the vast majority of potential financial supporters were coming from a desktop device, which was a stark difference from the rest of USA Rugby’s users (see Fig 1.). So we asked ourselves — Is it that the potential financial supporters just have a preference for desktop? Or is this signifying a problem with mobile? This led to our second finding covered below.
Figure 1: Device usage breakdown between potential financial supporters vs. all users
Finding 2: Missed opportunities for certain devices and browsers
2.1 Philanthropy pages are not optimized for mobile
Unsurprisingly, we discovered that there was in fact a number of problems with mobile optimization for the Philanthropy pages, which could explain the low number of mobile users:
The Donate link was broken on the mobile version of the site (Fig. 2).
There were repeated sub-categories in the mobile hamburger menu for the Philanthropy pages (Fig. 3).
Users had to click on the hamburger menu again to see any of the subpages nestled under ‘Philanthropy’, leaving those pages hidden to most mobile users (Fig 3).
Figure 2. Broken Donate link on mobile
Figure 3. Redundant subcategories under Philanthropy section that are also hidden within the hamburger menu on mobile
Recommendations:
- Fix the broken link that leads to the donate page on the hamburger menu in mobile.
- Optimize for mobile view of the Philanthropy subpages by making them visible outside of just the hamburger menu.
2.2. Slow load time for Chrome browsers
While a lack of mobile optimization could be what was deterring mobile device usage, this is still just a hypothesis. Perhaps potential financial supporters really do prefer desktop over mobile? We could see this being the case for users looking to inquire about corporate partnerships, where they might be using a desktop device at work. This led us to look into their preferred browser preferences where we found Chrome to be the leading browser of choice for potential financial supporters, 18% more when compared to all users.
Figure 4. Browser usage breakdown between financial supporters vs. all users
Yet, Chrome browsers featured some of the slowest load times at an average of 6.3 seconds amongst potential financial supporters. A user’s session recording in Hotjar showed just how slow this load time looked like on a Chrome browser (See Fig. 5). *The video shows a 4 second load time, while our segment’s average was even higher than that.
Figure 5. Hotjar session recording of a slow load time on Google Chrome
Recommendation:
-
Reduce unnecessary content, including resizing images to improve load time on Chrome for all users but especially for the potential financial supporters who seem to prefer Chrome.
What is their behavior within the site?
We wanted to see how the potential financial supporters were behaving within the sites’ pages and particularly, how they behaved within the financial support-related pages. Our analysis showed that while the Philanthropy and Partners pages were getting majority of the pageviews for this user segment, these users were hardly diving any deeper by visiting the other pages nestled within Philanthropy (See Fig. 6). This led us to investigate our third finding outlined below.
Finding 3: Lack of interest in & traffic to Philanthropy pages
3.1. Few pageviews for the /philanthropy/ subpages
While the Philanthropy parent page was getting almost 3k pageviews, the pages nestled within this section received very few in comparison (see Fig 6).
Figure 6. Top 10 pageviews on the top; pageviews for the Philanthropy subpages on the bottom
3.2. Lack of interaction with philanthropy related links on the home page
In addition to the low pageviews shown in Google Analytics, the Hotjar provided heatmaps of users’ clicks showed very little interaction with the philanthropy related links from the home page (see Fig. 7). This (along with click path analysis) indicated that users were not arriving to the Philanthropy-related pages from the home page as often as we would have thought, showing a missed opportunity to drive engagement from the home page.
Figure 7. Heatmap of users’ clicks homepage
3.3. Confusion with the Support/Donate label
When reviewing users’ session recordings in Hotjar for those that landed on the Philanthropy page during their visit, we noticed confusion around the “Support/Donate” category title given to Philanthropy pages in the global navigation. The session recording included below shows a user trying to find information on becoming a member, and mistaking “Support/Donate” as a label for help support.
Redesign Philanthropy section architecture
Recommendations:
-
Redesign Philanthropy section architecture. Change the page title and menu option name of the “Philanthropy” page to “Support Us” to give a clearer indication of what the page is about, which could drive more traffic and engagement to these pages.
OUR SOLUTIONS
Redesigning the home page to increase reach.
Based on our findings, our team created mockups for a redesigned home page on desktop, as we felt this would have the most significant impact on driving more engagement to the financial support-related pages.
Current home page
Change all titles for Philanthropy pages to --> Support Us. Hotjar session recordings showed that the Support/Donate label in the global menu was being cut-off in some browsers and only saying Support, leading some to confuse this with a help support page. This could explain the lack of interest in the philanthropy-related pages if those users weren’t actually interested in philanthropy, and could also be limiting those visitors who are interested from finding the Philanthropy pages.
Restructure the icons/search bar. There are a lot of icons under the current search bar and some aren’t easily identifiable - one of which is the donate icon where Hotjar recordings showed it had little engagement. They’re also crowded and hidden under the search bar. Breaking that section up with more strategic placement could encourage more engagement with these important CTAs.
Redesigned home page
REFLECTION
From insights to implementation.
We presented our research findings in a Slide Deck to some of the key stakeholders at USA Rugby. Interestingly, our findings in 3.3: Confusion with Support/Donate label was something that had previously been debated internally. The “Support/Donate” label came to be over a divide between calling it “Support” and calling it “Donate”, where they eventually settled on calling it both. The Hotjar session recording which showed a users’ confusion with the label, along with low pageviews to those pages overall, provided cause for finally ending this debate. Immediately after our research debrief, they changed this label to say “Donate”.
My parting thoughts.
I like to end each case study with a section on what I’d do differently if I had to do it over:
I think our biggest limitation in this study was trying to define our Google Analytics segmentation - the potential financial supporters. Because this microsegment was already so small at just 0.2% of users, we avoided making the segment even smaller — however, I think it may have been beneficial to divide the segment further to see the differences between those who donate to USA Rugby and those that are inquiring about partnerships/sponsorships.