The very first Frontgate catalog was delivered to 300,000 households wayyyyy back in 1991. It featured the finest home furniture, décor, and more.

Today, Frontgate is the leading home luxury multichannel retailer with catalog, ecommerce, and brick-and-mortar operations.

This post will show you how Frontgate used dynamic website testing to boost click-through rates by 10%. They were able to achieve this result even though the winning split changed over the course of several months. Dynamic Testing from Monetate automatically adjusted traffic in real-time to maximize ROI.

How they did it.

The goal:

Frontgate wanted to maximize click-through rate to individual product detail pages (via endcaps) to drive customers further down the sales funnel and increase conversions.

The solution:

The Frontgate marketing team recently used Dynamic Testing to determine the optimal placement of product recommendations on category pages (such as furniture, bedding, and décor).

The Dynamic Testing engine quickly determined the optimal location (which was at the top of the page) and automatically allocated the traffic to that split. As a result, Frontgate was able to realize a near-instant 10% click-through rate improvement.

If Frontgate had relied on traditional A/B testing, they would have ended the campaign then and declared the winning place for product recommendations: at the top of the category pages. Instead, the team used Dynamic Testing to continually explore other options and adjust content in real-time.

What they discovered was truly surprising.

As the test progressed, customer behavior changed. They learned that as the season progressed, the split showing product recommendations at the bottom of the page became the best split. Since Dynamic Testing is always re-assessing the landscape and driving results, it detected the shift and adjusted accordingly. This delivered conversions throughout the duration of the test, without any intervention from the Frontgate marketing team.

Frontgate’s Dynamic Testing results:

• 10% improvement to click-through rate
• More nimble approach to changing consumer behaviors. Since Dynamic Testing continually explored other splits to ensure the winning split was still the top performer, Frontgate realized an impressive ROI in a short amount of time. All while minimizing risk of a potential poor-performing split.
• Less time managing tests and analyzing results. Dynamic Testing automatically allocates traffic to the best-performing split
• Faster time to ROI. Frontgate was able to determine the best split for the time of season, even when that split changed based on shifting consumer behavior.

Adam Godfrey, Sr. Digital Marketing and Analytics Specialist for Frontgate said:

Marketers are constantly faced with tough decisions, forcing them to run tests and make choices based on single tests or even gut instinct. Developing campaigns based on hope is not an effective strategy. Fortunately, with Dynamic Testing, we can build and establish tests along the way, and make constant incremental adjustments based on how each test is running. This has been critical to the evolution of our testing program and we’ve seen extensive benefits as a result.

Find out how Dynamic Testing can revolutionize your website optimization strategy.

Dynamic Testing monitors real-time customer behaviors to deliver improved ROI on your winning ideas (compared to traditional A/B testing). Best of all, it can optimize traffic based on any goal metric you can dream up (conversion rate, click-through rate, form submission, etc.)