Adobe® Marketing Cloud Success Story
Ancestry.com
Discover, preserve, and share
Ancestry.com
Provo, Utah
www.ancestry.com
Results
• Grew mobile web-based
registrations
• Increased possible lifetime revenues
by changing subscription terms in
response to data from Adobe
Marketing Cloud
• Customized and optimized visitor
experience
• Optimized choice of sign-on
channels for maximum revenue
Ancestry.com uses Adobe Marketing Cloud to personalize
content and make it easier for people to discover their family
stories and histories
Ancestry.com is the largest online family history resource in the world, serving more
than two million paid subscribers. Visitors can view any of 11 billion digitized records,
eliminating the need to visit parishes, cemeteries, or libraries for birth, death, and
marriage information. In addition, people can search beyond simple names and dates,
looking at photos of people, signatures on census documents, and ship’s manifests for
even richer insights into their family histories.
Ancestry.com sought to maintain its leadership in the market while establishing a base among
younger people, who are more likely to use mobile devices. It had been using Adobe Marketing
Cloud for ten years, but had siloed its Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target solutions. “We realized
that we had much to gain by pulling these solution sets into the same organization so we could use
analytics both to influence the tests we conducted and study results,” says Brandon Camp, director
of conversion, marketing at Ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com fully integrated the Adobe solutions. It also used the data connectors capability within
Adobe Analytics to integrate data with its internal data warehouse for easy exports and imports of
and with external feeds. The company now uses a more integrated set of Adobe Marketing Cloud
solutions to power an executive dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of the company’s
performance and encompasses data from its data warehouse, Adobe Marketing Cloud, a HootSuite
social media dashboard, offline billing, and other systems.
An early win for testing and optimization
Early on, Ancestry.com decided to use Adobe Marketing Cloud to study its pricing and packaging structure.
It set up and ran a complete, multivariate test of its pricing structure and creative approach. The results
changed the way it sold subscriptions—and won new respect for testing from internal teams.
“Adobe showed us that over time a semiannual subscription structure could result in a lifetime revenue
lift, compared to only the annual subscription option we offered,” says Camp. “That changed the way we
run our business; we now focus much more on our testing and optimization program because we’ve
seen how much of an impact it can make when we gather and analyze data and use it to drive decisions.”
Maximizing the mobile channel
Ancestry.com also wanted to reach beyond its traditional demographic to engage younger audiences
through mobile apps and even a television show. It used Adobe Marketing Cloud to test its product
roadmap for the mobile app, and understand how visitors interact with the app. The results have been
phenomenal. Today, a much larger percentage of registrations are coming from mobile. The company
has already seen more than seven million downloads of its mobile apps for Android™, iOS, and Windows® 8.
In the Android Marketplace in 2012, the app was one of the top 12 apps.
“There’s a big difference between mobile apps and mobile webpages,” explains Camp. “Adobe
Marketing Cloud gives us the capability and flexibility to test both thoroughly, to make sure that
our marketing is working well and that the features in our apps are right for our service and our
subscriber base.”
Testing with Adobe Marketing Cloud suggested a simpler login screen—with just one or two
elements instead of three—would be more effective and produced an 8% lift in responses.
Challenge
• Cultivate a broader audience with a
high-quality mobile presence
• Understand how to maximize
subscription revenues
• Improve visitor experience with
more customization to simplify site
complexity
Solution
• Integrate Adobe Analytics and
Adobe Target within Adobe
Marketing Cloud to create and
support culture of data-driven
decision making
• Leverage Adobe Marketing Cloud
for insights to optimize both customer
experience and business revenues
Systems at a glance
Adobe Marketing Cloud, including
Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.
Capabilities used include: •Marketing reports & analytics
•Ad hoc analysis
•A/B/N and multivariate testing
•Rules based targeting
•Geotargeting
When Ancestry.com decided to sell subscriptions through its mobile app, it had to weigh the benefits of
different approaches. If the company sold subscriptions through Android, it could either use Google Play
marketplace or redirect people to its own online sign-up flow. Google Play offered an easy, one-click
purchase process, but Google would receive 30% of the sale. Redirecting visitors to the mobile website
would mean they would have to enter more information. The question was: would the simplicity of the
Google Play payment method increase subscriptions enough to compensate for the 30% revenue loss?
Adobe solutions revealed the answer. The simpler purchase experience on Google Play did indeed
generate more orders than directing people to its own mobile website, but it didn’t deliver the desired
value. “We saw more transactions through Google Play, but the additional revenue generated by
sending visitors through our own mobile purchase flow far outweighed the additional transactions,”
says Camp.
Adding value for visitors
A subscription-based business has to continually engage its subscribers by offering value and ease of
use. To help people find what they’re looking for without overwhelming them with 11 billion records,
Ancestry.com grouped online data into a more manageable set of 30,000 collections. Now, Ancestry.com
further improves the visitor experience by identifying visitor behaviors and presenting the most relevant
and popular collections to each visitor.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud helps us capture information on a visitor’s interests and create more
personalized journeys for each person,” says Camp. “Whether they want to map out a family tree,
add to the tree they’ve already created, or just search for records, Adobe helps us customize their
experience and increase satisfaction.”
Data-driven testing
With Adobe Marketing Cloud helping to identify distinct visitor behaviors, Ancestry.com began a
formal program of testing different web pages to see how different types of visitors responded. For
example, team members thought that its home page needed three sections, but testing showed
that simplifying the page to just one or two calls to action increased conversion.
Deeper into the site, the Adobe solutions revealed visitor reactions that the team hadn’t expected.
For example, for return visitors who hadn’t yet registered, the company discovered that free-trial
messaging resonated better than educational information on using the site.
“We learned to let the data from Adobe Marketing Cloud guide us, rather than relying on hunches,”
says Camp. The company can now experiment with messaging to different audiences, refining its
content based on what most engages visitors and drives revenue.
“Adobe showed us that over time a semiannual subscription
structure could result in a lifetime revenue lift…we now focus
much more on our testing and optimization program because
we’ve seen how much of an impact it can make when we gather
and analyze data and use it to drive decisions.”
Brandon Camp, director of conversion, marketing, Ancestry.com
Rooted in the past but focusing on the future
While Ancestry.com is confident in its current choices, it is also planning to revisit its sites and
processes every time a new factor comes to light or a new capability is added. For example, when
Ancestry.com offers auto-renew of subscriptions or free trials through Google Play, the company
can run further tests.
“In a subscription business, you need to look at how people renew over time,” says Camp. “As the
data matures, we continue to look for insights with Adobe Analytics and are coming across many
more interesting opportunities. Adobe Marketing Cloud is a key to our ongoing business success,
because we can continually test and reevaluate our offerings to maintain our leading market position.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/
digital-marketing.html
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