Case Study
It’s Trulia Important to Optimize the Entire User Experience
Trulia gives home buyers, sellers and real estate agents all the tools and valuable information they need to be successful in the home search process. Through its innovative mobile and web products, Trulia provides engaged home buyers and sellers essential information about the house, the neighborhood, and the process while connecting them with the right agents. For agents, Trulia, together with its Market Leader subsidiary, provides an end-to-end system that enables them to find and serve clients, create lasting relationships, and build their business. Founded in 2005, Trulia is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Denver, and Seattle.
Challenge
Increase online lead conversion across Consumer Source Inc.’s (a PRIMEDIA company) four consumer
Finding an optimization platform that would help improve the user experience for different
audiences on Trulia’s website.
Solution
Only SiteSpect lets companies test the entire user experience – from how a site looks and
works – and target anyone.
Results
By providing the best possible online customer experience, Trulia’s site traffic has grown 42% year-over-year as of Q1 2014.
Agile Testing
Trulia is the leading online marketplace for home buyers, sellers, renters, and real estate professionals. To succeed in a service industry such as real estate, it is vital to cater to every audience. In order to do that, Trulia sought an optimization platform to help them identify the best-performing combination of features and design elements for both home buyers and realtors. It was critical that this new solution fit into Trulia’s agile development framework.
“Trulia chose SiteSpect because the functionality fits well with our rapid, iterative development process,” said Dan Voorhies, Director of Analytics at Trulia. “For smaller changes to Trulia, SiteSpect allows us to modify content outside of our release process and quickly use quantitative data to evaluate changes. SiteSpect also works well for traffic management, allocation, and analytics for the larger-scale testing that is needed for major changes in the user experience.”
Tag-free Approach
Trulia appreciated SiteSpect’s ability to run tag-free, server-side tests because client-side optimization solutions had the potential to ruin the user experience on the site. “One of the keys to A/B testing is the ability to iterate rapidly, so we liked that SiteSpect offered us the ability to run simple HTML find-and-replace tests without needing to push the test products live during our standard release cycle,” Voorhies noted.
Trulia began using SiteSpect in late 2011, testing a variety of pages that run deep into the funnel. Now, nearly every page redesign on Trulia is tested through SiteSpect. This includes major overhauls of its webpages, such as the home page, the search results pages, and the individual property pages, as well as small aesthetic changes such as button colors and sizes.
New Feature Testing
Testing new features helps the company hone in on the most intuitive page layout for the visitor. According to Voorhies, the result is a much cleaner and more navigable page. The company also tests new user features to understand their impact on key consumer and business metrics. Data derived from SiteSpect experiments guides Trulia in making site changes that improve the online user experience, leading to better customer engagement and loyalty.
“Any time we put out a new feature, SiteSpect allows us to run a side-by-side experiment, and then use data and analytics to determine whether it’s a good thing for site visitors on both desktop and mobile,” said Voorhies. “For example, we knew there were certain features that were valuable, but they were down on the page. Moving these features to a more prominent place on the right rail of the page or right below the picture, helped drive a lot more engagement.”
Optimization Pays Off
“At Trulia, we want to make sure that we are constantly innovating to create the best possible user experiences for homebuyers, sellers, and renters,” said Voorhies. “Testing with SiteSpect offers us a way to measure the side-by-side performance of these designs with a much larger sample of users than would be possible in a qualitative study.”
Voorhies said that Trulia is constantly running tests to make sure that the site is optimized for the user experience. In fact, at any given time, the company may have up to six concurrent tests running to improve different areas of the site.
“Internet-based companies have the unique opportunity to measure and quantify user preferences through their behaviors. The ability to run true randomized tests is a huge differentiator from offline industries,” Voorhies concluded. “If you foster an iterative, hypothesis-driven culture at your company, you can let users ‘vote with their clicks’ to answer key optimization questions, as opposed to assuming what users want.”
