Online grocery prepared for the GDPR and optimized their website with Piwik PRO

We can’t disclose the name of our client, as they want to remain anonymous. What we can say is that the client is a grocery retailer with over 7000 locations and one of the leading online supermarkets in Western Europe. They take advantage of their presence both online and offline to offer better value and convenience to their customers.

Challenges

Customer data security was something that the client put a strong focus on, and with the GDPR coming it became even more of a priority. Their website needed to be adjusted to the new law and they wanted a partner that could make this transition easier. They were looking for a way to ask online visitors for their consent to use personal data, in a manner that would be compliant with the upcoming regulation. What’s more, the client was limited by other privacy policies. That forced them to find a solution which could be hosted on servers in Europe, with the greatest regard for data safety. They also needed to have a full ownership of the data that would be collected.

Another issue that troubled them was their website usability. It has an extensive offer that includes not only products, but also services. They were worried about their customers’ experience and satisfaction when interacting with the brand online. Smoothing their customers’ journey across all of their websites was one of their priorities. They wanted to make sure that users reached certain goals on the website, like finding a local store or signing up for a newsletter, in a fast and convenient way.

Finally, the client wanted to connect their online and offline activities. They wanted to use data from the online channel to support sales and marketing activities at local stores.

Implementation

After thorough research on analytics and consent management tools, the client chose Piwik PRO Analytics Suite. The deciding factor was that Piwik PRO offered an analytics platform adapted to data privacy rules all over the world, with the client keeping full data ownership. Piwik PRO Consent Manager provided a GDPR-compliant way to collect visitor consents. On top of that, Piwik PRO’s Customer Data Platform could help the client with their marketing activities.

The client needed to host the platform locally, but didn’t have the infrastructure and administrators to maintain it. Piwik PRO’s specialists stepped in to help, choosing suitable servers in a local data center. They took over the remote management of said infrastructure to make sure that things ran smoothly and to keep the highest security standards. The client had tracking set up across all of their domains and subdomains – about 350 sites in total. That’s where Piwik PRO Tag Manager came in handy, making tag implementation hassle-free and saving time for the client’s IT department.

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite in action

The data collected by Piwik PRO Analytics served to optimize user experience on the website and the entire customer journey. The client analyzed paths taken by visitors to get to the local branch finder and weekly promotional booklet and made changes to shorten by 35% the number of steps to reach those goals. The client gathered and acted on data related to signups for a newsletter with current offers and promotions, leading to a 17% increase in subscriptions.

Findings coming from new data supported their omnichannel marketing efforts. The client started tracking important customer journey interactions, like items added to shopping lists or the number of promotional booklet downloads. They used Customer Data Platform to build audience clusters and group users by preferred store location and trade area. Based on that information, the client could evaluate product seasonality for each location and the influence of regional promotions on customer shopping behavior. It was also valuable information when forecasting demand in local stores and estimating manpower needs.

All of that wouldn’t have been possible without Piwik PRO Consent Manager to collect visitor consents in a GDPR-compliant manner. Initially, right after GDPR came into force, the client noticed a significant drop-off in analytics data – only 6% of visitors agreed to the use of their data. With time, Piwik PRO optimized the consent pop-up, the client made changes in the design and copy and the percent of people agreeing to the use of their data increased to 36%. The implementation of data anonymization in Piwik PRO Analytics made the biggest difference. It allowed the client to collect anonymous data about visitors without waiting for their consent, as that type of data doesn’t infringe on their privacy and is completely compliant with data protection regulations. That filled the data gap and provided the client with the information necessary for future optimizations.