How GDO improved its digital experience achieving a 2.6-point conversion uplift

The company

Golf Digest Online (GDO) is a leading provider of digital services tailored for golf enthusiasts. Based in Japan, the company also operate other businesses such as media and advertisement, golf lessons, score management applications, and portal sites.

GDO also hosts one of the largest ecommerce golf shops in Japan, offering top-brand golf equipment, apparel, and accessories.

Within the company, Hirotoshi Kato leads the user experience (UX) design team, responsible for expanding the customer base, with UX at its core. The division relies heavily on user insights to personalize and enhance their digital customer journeys.

The challenge

GDO is committed to putting customers its first and delivering a flawless digital experience (DX) every time. This involves consistently finding and fixing areas that need improvement, making sure the experience of each of their digital platforms evolves and adapts to their customers’ needs.

With such a diverse range of services, tracking these needs requires constant testing and optimization. For GDO, traditional methods like user tests and customer satisfaction surveys, including Net Promoter Scores (NPS), quickly became too time-intensive and resource-heavy.

GDO is committed to putting customers first and delivering a flawless digital experience every time. This involves consistently finding and fixing areas that need improvement, making sure the experience of each of their digital platforms evolves and adapts to their customers’ needs.

Hirotoshi Kato

Director of the User Experience Design Division

The solution

To tackle these challenges and maintain the quality of their digital services, GDO turned to Contentsquare's Experience Analytics platform, using it across 3 main areas:

1. Testing during the development phase: by integrating Contentsquare into the development environment, the company can collect user behavior data directly from the test site

2. Improving existing services: the UX planning and service teams meet every 2 weeks to discuss and A/B test improvements based on insights gained from Contentsquare analysis

3. Optimizing the mobile app experience: analyzing session replays of app users makes it possible to see problem areas, understand their causes, and make targeted improvements

Contentsquare's experience intelligence platform helped them identify pain points causing negative experiences and abandoned journeys across their platforms. Contentsquare also helped them address these issues in the ways that made the most sense for their customers.

Streamlining the user testing process

User testing is typically a resource-intensive process for GDO. So when they were launching a new golf course reservation system, they wanted to simplify and streamline this process.

Typically, GDO could only conduct user tests with 5 people due to limited resources on-site, but with Contentsquare, they were able to work with 78 users.

They conducted 2 types of tests:

1. Asking users to complete a reservation in a specific journey

2. Letting users play with the reservation system without any guidance—a so-called 'monkey test'

Next, the team used Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability to analyze the behavior of those users, which revealed looping journeys during the booking process, right at the confirmation step.

Insights from Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability revealed users were looping back around on the confirmation page before their journey was complete.

To understand why, they turned to Contentsquare's Session Replay capability.

Session replays revealed users were seeing an error message: 'the start time is sold out'.

This confusing message made users go back to the previous page, a step that the page structure didn't allow, causing them to drop off. What’s more, 15% of users reached the error page without looping due to a system error.

By using Contentsquare to test the system ahead of launching their new reservation system, the team was able to

• Uncover UX issues that would have likely been missed otherwise

• Reduce friction and create a seamless customer journey

• Help customers achieve their goals and minimize abandonment

Increasing booking conversions

One of the services offered by GDO is the ‘single person reservation’, which allows individual golfers to form groups and play rounds together.

To reduce abandonment of the application form and increase conversions, the team used Heatmaps and found that some users were browsing to the bottom of the page.

After analyzing the click-through rate (CTR), they discovered 2 key issues:

• Users were abandoning the application process: the click rate for the 'Book' call-to-action (CTA) button was significantly lower than the 'I accept the precautions' checkbox, with abandonment rates of 40% for new users and 53.8% for existing ones

• Users were clicking on non-button areas: a notice about reservation completion conditions was clicked 7.69% of the time

The UX planning team analyzed click-through rates to understand why users weren't completing their applications, despite browsing the page.

Using Session Replay, they could see that after checking the 'I accept the terms and conditions' checkbox, users reread the terms and conditions on the page or tried to go back to the previous step in the reservation process.

This suggested that users on the application page were confused and unable to understand the service’s functions and precautions before making a reservation.

Based on these insights, the team conducted an A/B test, making the booking process more intuitive by updating the top header image and making the description link more visible. The goal was to reduce drop-offs and increase conversion rates—and it worked.

Conversions on successful form submissions increased by 2.6 points on the new version of the application page.

With more visible description links, the GDO team saw a significant increase in CTR on the applications page.

Improving mobile app UX

GDO turned to Contentsquare yet again to analyze their golf score management mobile app and pinpoint bottlenecks before its launch.

A typical golf course has 18 holes and users input their scores after each hole to complete the round. However, the UX team noticed that many users were exiting without saving their scores, rendering the app useless.

They used Journey Analysis to follow the user journey through the app to see what they did after completing their game. The team discovered that

1. Users were receiving an error message stating that data could not be saved because some information hadn't been entered, even though they had filled in all required fields

2. Users who encountered these errors were following a repetitive journey of reviewing the scorecard and trying to resubmit

3. This led users to repeatedly return to the scorecard entry page, ultimately leaving the app in frustration

This Contentsquare dashboard depicts GDO data collected at the 18th hole to see what users did in the application after completing their game.

Watching replays of user sessions allowed the team to confirm which areas were causing friction and to better understand why users were struggling in the first place. They could see the error was not due to missing scores from the user but rather from their playing partners. A small dash indicating this missing information was easily overlooked.

Additionally, the app was designed to track only the user's scores, not those of their companions.

GDO realized that the reason for this error (framed in red) wasn't because of their score but that the people they were playing with had not entered all of their scores

Thanks to Contentsquare's customer insights, GDO quickly identified and resolved the issue, significantly improving the user experience by making sure users could accurately save their hard-earned scores.

The results

For each strategic change, GDO used a data-driven and customer-centric approach, making optimizations using insights from Contentsquare that had a powerful impact on their processes.

• More efficient customer behavior analysis: Contentsquare helps GDO analyze vast amounts of user data quickly and effectively, reducing the time and effort required for traditional user tests

• Hypothesis-based improvements: by pinpointing specific user pain points and testing ideas, GDO can make the changes that truly matter and that lead to measurable business results

• Cross-departmental usage: Contentsquare's user-friendly interface allows different departments—including marketing, design, development, and sales—to access and use insights to continue optimizing the customer experience

We hope to make 'looking at UX a part of our company culture, whether it be the marketing team in charge of campaigns in the business division, the designers working on the user interface (UI), the development team that creates the products, or the sales department that's responsible for revenue.

Hirotoshi Kato

Director of the User Experience Design Division

What's Next for GDO

GDO has yet to uncover all of the opportunities Contentsquare has to offer. They plan to expand platform use across their services and make UX improvements a core part of their company culture.

Team members from various departments will use Contentsquare to see firsthand what their customers experience, understand the full context of their actions, and make improvements from their perspectives, setting a new standard for exceptional digital experiences.