GoDaddy + UserTesting

GoDaddy is well-known for providing customers the tools they need to build and grow their online presence. As part of their goal to be a one-stop shop, their research team strives to continually evaluate the end-to-end journey of users. 

The company first leveraged UserTesting in 2018 to get to know how new business owners, one of their main segments, select a solution to help them grow their business. GoDaddy’s team ran an awareness and consideration study to evaluate how this segment navigates the customer journey.

GoDaddy’s team leveraged UserTesting to observe how customers and prospects felt after watching their ads, interacting with their homepage, and navigating their website. And they also sought to compare how the company performed in comparison to two of its main competitors.

In this first study, the company found that prospective customers' confidence in the brand declined significantly as they progressed through these steps.

These insights helped GoDaddy implement a variety of changes which included improving their website and updating their branding and videos. The company also shifted from using a celebratory endorser to highlighting visionary entrepreneurs that were more relatable to their target customers. 

Because implementing these changes required a huge lift for GoDaddy’s team, the company wanted to see if they had positively impacted the customer experience. To test that, GoDaddy’s team set out to replicate the study they had conducted in 2018 with the help of UserTesting.

To preserve the integrity of their data and be able to draw an accurate comparison from their second awareness and consideration study, GoDaddy’s team set out to replicate the tests they had conducted in 2018. Doing this was an easy task thanks to UserTesting.

The team notes that being able to easily duplicate surveys and webpages this second time around helped the team drastically reduce time and resources spent and gather insights faster.

This cut down time on study development significantly. Not only were their researchers able to run more sessions for this second round of the study, but they were also able to expedite their analysis of their findings.

This was especially useful as the company had to conduct this study through the lens of COVID-19. UserTesting empowered GoDaddy’s team to quickly gather user data and insights remotely, and the team notes that it also provided them with tools to quickly analyze their findings.

UserTesting’s highlight reels also proved to be very useful to GoDaddy’s team. The tool saved them hours in compiling feedback and allowed team members to quickly glance across sessions to identify key moments and insights in the customer journey.

The company was eager to see improvements in the way new business owners perceived their brand after conducting this second study. 

The company noted that 50% of contributors still continued to think of GoDaddy first during the awareness stage and that their appeal with consumers had improved. On the downside, GoDaddy’s test revealed that the percentage of prospective customers who considered GoDaddy a “best fit” brand decreased. Additionally, while their appeal among customers had improved, so had that of their competitors.

The team points out that although they found that there was still much more room for improvement, his team had the right insights to drive those changes. Overall, the results of this study have inspired several ideas related to their advertising, sign up page, search engine marketing, time and resources invested in review sites, landing page updates, and how to best leverage GoDaddy's support team.

The insights GoDaddy discovered through this study has equipped them with a clear plan of action moving forward. GoDaddy’s team plans to test how showcasing their website builder’s product features performs with their customers. The company’s SEO team will also implement popular keywords that came up as themes during customer conversations. And they also plan to implement several changes on their website to streamline the website customer journey.