METRO Social Share Tools Optimisation

METRO Social Share Tools Optimisation

Explore optimization opportunities for social share tools on METRO’s website

Assignment:

Explore optimization opportunities for social share tools on METRO’s website, to improve social channel interaction and in return increase website traffic.


Outcome:

With analytics data and resources constraints, this project gave us an opportunity to put forward recommendations that fit the business purpose at the time of recommendation based on available resources. 

More importantly, we were given the chance to ask questions and identify where there is still room to set up tracking for better overall performance monitoring. 

Questions to stakeholders were: 

  • Where in the website have users journeyed? 
  • What do they do when they get there? 
  • How are they engaging with the website?
  • How do we currently measure effectiveness / ROI of share tools? 
  • What do we achieve with share tools optimisation?

Edit: In the following year, the company has migrated it’s analytics tool to one that is deemed to be much cost effective when setting up tracking and able to provide a much intuitive user experience for the wider internal consumer.

Please drop me a message if you would like to learn more about the important findings and key data points, or explore the deliverables listed further below.

Approach: 

  1. Benchmark against competitors on social share trends.
  2. Analyse existing social share tool data to understand how users interact with the different social share icons, which devices and social platform generates most clicks of share.
  3. Put forward recommendations on optimisation based on benchmark and analytics findings.
METRO Visual Benchmark desktop
METRO Visual Benchmark (desktop)
METRO Visual Benchmark mobile web
METRO Visual Benchmark (mobile web)

Challenges:

  1. In absence of a traditional face to face findings presentation, come up with a time saving and effective method to share findings & deliverables to busy stakeholders.
  2. Work on analytics data with limited assistance from a tightly resourced analytics team.
  3. Generate optimisation ideas that require minimal technical resource for implementation. At the same time employing a sustainable tracking approach to measure success. 
  4. Communicate diplomatically the rationale behind grayscale wireframes to stakeholders who are used to seeing full coloured visual designs.
  5. Collaborate and negotiate with developers to explore technical feasibility of recommendations.
  6. Due to internal prioritisation of projects against resources – at the time of writing, this UX piece is pending exploration by visual designers before it can be resourced against development.

Team:

  • Project Manager
  • Developers
  • UX Visual Designer
  • UX Architect – June Lim
  • Product Owners (stakeholders)

UX Activities:

  • Project scoping/ briefing/ kick-off
  • Competitor benchmark exercises
  • Adobe Analytics tracking findings 
  • Findings sharing
  • Collaborative design sessions

UX Deliverables:

  • Competitor benchmark reports (excel & visual)
  • METRO’s social share tools analytics report
  • Hypotheses generation exercise
  • UX visual design workshop
  • Sketches/ Wireframes
Please drop me a message if you would like to learn more about the important findings and key data points, or explore the project deliverables.

METRO social share tools optimisation 2
METRO social share tools optimisation wireframes

Recent Implementation:

METRO Dekstop - Social Share Tools optimisation (set live August 4th 2022)
METRO Desktop – Social Share Tools optimisation
METRO Mobile web - Social Share Tools optimisation (set live August 4th 2022)
METRO Mobile web – Social Share Tools optimisation

Implementation NOTES:

Prior to implementation, stakeholders had decided not to A/B test the change. There were several reasons behind:

  • Social share tools had not been updated in many years, and stakeholders are purely curious to see results (steep increase or decrease would have been more telling even without A/B test)
  • Experiments with wider sister company share tools even with A/B testing weren’t showing dramatic results.
  • It was also hypothesised that content has to be compelling enough for user to share.

Early Findings/ Insights:

Based on early data, it appears that the implementation has resulted in lower social shares, with a spike in shares during the month of July when UK was experiencing multiple heatwaves. However the data range is rather short, it would be fitting to continue monitoring the performance for a longer period before making an informed conclusion.

For details on data source and range, how data is collected and analysed, please get in touch.