With over millions of people visiting the Virtual Event Bags each year, our product team is closely monitoring performance and drawing out observations about improving the key metrics for event sponsors and exhibitors. The key metrics for the sponsors and exhibitors are views and actions on their content. Naturally, our goal is to make it easy for visitors to view and take action on many (if not all) pieces of content in bag.
We observed a pattern occurring with bag visitors which caught our attention. The overall visit rate to the event bags are consistently trending between 60-75% – which is excellent. When visitors view more details for a placement the action rate is typically near 50% – again a nice metric. What we found is something was keeping visitors from viewing details of many placements during their time in the bag. This finding launched a project which would involve rebuilding the bag experience with the goal of making the process easier for visitors to quickly view details for many pieces of content.
As we worked on the design for the new experience, we decided to enhance the presentation on mobile devices – specifically smart phones. With more than 60% of bag visitors surfing through the bag contents on their mobile device, the experience must be fast and behave more like a native mobile app. This short overview video illustrates the difference between the previous version and the new experience.
Now that you’ve seen the differences, I’ll add some detail and further explanation to the new features and updates you’ll see in the new bag experience.
Fast Detail View Loading
When navigating the web on a mobile device, visitors have been found to exit out of a site when pages load slowly. Since native apps are super fast and fluid experience people have grown to expect similar behavior from websites when browser on their smart phones. In the previous version of the bag experience, each time a visitor clicked to view details of a placement the entire page would be refreshed or changed. In the new experience the detail view loads quickly and without a page refresh. We believe speedy views attribute to more speedy views.
Linear vs. Cyclical Navigation
People follow the most obvious path of engagement when visiting an event bag. In the previous version we found the visitor engagement behavior was “linear”. A visitor would view a placement and take action as planned, but many actions navigate them out of the bag – hence creating a linear experience. When creating the new experience, we crafted the “cyclical” experience to enable visitors to view the details of many pieces of content in a single visit. The cyclical experience starts when a visitor views details on any placement. When viewing details the visitor can now browse to details of more placements simply by clicking next or previous. This activity creates a cyclical behavior and provides a solution to increasing the content details a person views in their bag.
New Featured Section
Since the beginning event organizers have been able to highlight key placements. In the previous experience the event bag touted a “billboard” slider section at the top of the bag. Sliders or moving elements can provide a nice effect, but we found performance lagging for placements toward the tail end of the billboard slider. In an effort to build toward increasing engagement and performance, it was time to move away from the slider and introduce the “Featured” section. Now event organizers can show off content in the top of their bags in the new featured section which display larger highlighted thumbnail views.
Save for Later
The bag experience has always had a feature for visitors to save placements and return later when they are ready to take action – shop, learn, download, etc. In this new experience we have streamlined the process of saving content, again to speed up the experience. In the previous version when saving content the visitor would be introduced to another section/page of the bag – My Saved Content. While it was good to show visitors where their content was being saved, it took them away from view more content. Now when a visitor saves content the action completes instantly and keeps the cycle of view more content in motion. Visitors can view their saved content by filtering the bag to only show saved content at any time during their visit.
Final Thoughts
Observations lead to continuous improvement. As our product team continues reviewing and monitoring performance, we will always be striving toward improving the experience for event organizers, sponsors/exhibitors and the bag visitors. We hope you love this new bag experience as much as your audience does. The more your audience enjoys the experience the happier your sponsors and exhibitors will be with their performance.