Putting things straight

Tom Beverley (Digital Marketing Director), Chris Lewis (Dev Team Lead)

10th May 2011

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Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Us

Tom Beverley Chris Lewis

• Digital and Customer

Marketing Director

• Thomas.beverley6@googlemail

.com

• Twitter: tombev

• Dev Team Lead

• Chris.Lewis@confused.com

Confused.com

• Pure play digital…

• … but huge ATL marketing spend (c£3m / month)

• Digital, eCRM and content channels increasingly

important

• 20+ products (not just car insurance)

• Microsoft technology stack

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Why did we bother with a CMS?

• Critical tool for digital, content and eCRMmarketing…

• Giving all our marketers the power to easily publish pages in a controllable, auditable and robust fashion

Let developers develop and web producers produce

Channel based landing page strategy

• Five to ten landing pages per product. Maximum

• Ability to A/B test and optimise pages limited due to process and IT resource constraints

• Random oddities in design

• Hard to track workflow

• Compliance tracking nightmare

Before Sitecore / a bad or no CMS

• Car insurance over 200 landing pages, channel and campaign specific

• Ability to A/B test much improved as simple to roll out new pages

• Robust design

• Simple, auditable workflows

• Simple compliance changes, change copy once and publish across 100s of pages

With Sitecore / a good CMS

Hugely transformational for SEO…

ANNUITIES SEO PAGEFLOWVersion 0.1

Direct to siteSEO annuities

AN01SEO landing page/annuities

AN1.3.nProviders pages

AN1.1Guide landing page/annuities/guides

AN1.2Annuities FAQ/annuities/FAQ

AN1.1.2Guide #2/annuities/guides/XXX

AN1.1.4Guide #4/annuities/guides/XXX

AN1.1.nGuide n/annuities/guides/n

AN1.1.1Guide #1/annuities/guides/what-is-an-annuity?

AN1.1.3Guide #3/annuities/guides/XXX

AN1.1.1Guide #5/annuities/guides/XXX

AN1.0Compare (quote)Annuity.confused.com

AN1.3Annuities providers/annuities/providers

AN2.nSpecialist keyword landing pages (types of annuity)/annuities/specialist

These will be prioritised by keywordAnd all share IA below

AN1.4Retirement options/annuities/retirement-options

AN1.5Annuities glossary/annuities/glossary

AN1.6Case studies/annuities/case-studies

AN1.7News/annuities/news

• Annuities site map – 30 to 40 pages…

• … five different page templates

• Two man days to build site and upload content

… and PPC in just two months

Rapid ability to build out 100s of keyword relevant landing pages in days not weeks 10% to 35% decreases in bounce rates

Content site of critical importance to

eCRM, SEO and content marketing

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Why we thought we had a problem

A web content management (WCM) system is a CMS designed to simplifythe publication of web content to web sites and mobile devices — in particular, allowing content creators to create, submit and manage content without requiring technical knowledge of any Web Programming Languages or Markup Languages such as HTML or the uploading of files.

Source: Wikipedia

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

1. Hard to create or change content.

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

2. Hard to re-use content.

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

3. IT have “hacked” it – upgrade path blocked.

Automated ValidationSEO ToolingWorkflow ManagementCollaborationWeb Standards UpgradesScalable ExpansionDocument ManagementContent Syndication (e.g. RSS, Atom, Email)Multi LanguagesVersioningMulti-Variant TestingUser TrackingPersonalisation

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

4. Editors share admin login – auditing impossible.

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

5. “User access wars”.

Why we thought we had a problem

Features of a “bad” CMS implementation

6. Poor automated validation.

Why we thought we had a problem

What makes a good CMS implementation?

1. Users doing what they should

2. High degree of Content Re-use

3. Rich native feature-set

4. Intuitive user experiences

5. System can grow with you

6. Good project management

Why we thought we had a problem

What did we do?

We knew we had a problem (Sep 2009)

We examined our options

We chose a new platform

We trained our developers

We ran a proof of concept (H1 2010)

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

What we’re currently working on

CMS Migration Project

Project kick off – Oct 2010

Release 1 –Confused

Corporate Site (18th Jan 2011)

Release 2 –Confused

Provider Pages (10th Feb 2011)

Release 3 –Confused

Landing Pages (23rd March

2011)

Release 4 –Confused

Content Site (ETA - End May)

Release 5 –Confused

Homepage and miscellaneous

(TBC)

What we’re currently working on

*All new pages created entirely be editors – zero IT involvement.*

What we’re currently working on

Progress

• 7 Months in…

• Work to switch off legacy CMS 75% complete

• 9 developer sprints (69 man weeks*)

• 366 pages now live (2.6m hits per month*)

• ~4000 articles due end of month (5m hits per month**)

* Full time staff (excludes 13 contractor weeks)** Based on analysing 4 days traffic (16th - 19th April)

What we’re currently working on

Measuring benefits

• Productivity

• SEO trends

• Throughput

• Flexibility

• Cost

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Successes and Lessons Learned

Successes so far

Page publication productivity

IT drastically less involved

SEO implications*

Mass content migration from legacy system

White-labeling

Release automation

Successes and Lessons Learned

Challenges

! Sticking to platform’s best practices.

! Resisting urge for complicated workflows.

! Release & Config Management.

! Automated testing.

Successes and Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

o Choose the right people.

o Choose the right parts of your site.

o Choose the right platform.

o Invest time (POC, Training, Testing).

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Future Plans

Community / User Engagement

MVT

Personalising User Experience

Mobile

Agenda

• Introduction

• Times we’ve felt we needed a CMS

• CMS and digital marketing

• Why we thought we had a problem

• What we’re currently working on

• Successes and Lessons Learned

• Future plans

• Q & A

Q & A

Any Questions?

Q & A

http://bit.ly/kxBeUA

@Confused_com

If you have questions don’t be shy!

Come to stand E6040 for a chat.

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