Summary

Audi Beta is a complete redesign, crafted to deliver the best website experience of any premium automotive business. The site seeks to break the tradition of how automotive brands show their products online. Instead of displaying pages upon pages of confusing material, the Beta site is thoughtfully stripped back, leading users effortlessly through their journey.

Beautiful content immerses users in the Audi brand, and native device features deliver experiences that are both delightful and relevant. Important objectives were to drive more visitors to the key areas of the site to compare
models, view used cars and prepare a quote. This modern, premium, adaptive site delivers an exceptional user experience and creates radical differentiation. It is a quintessential example of Audi’s lasting commitment to Vorsprung
durch Technik – progress through technology.

Objectives

Audi’s objective was to provide the best website experience of any premium automotive business. It wanted to deliver a customer-first, responsive site that makes it easier for visitors to research, configure and buy an Audi. Audi knew that customers were finding three things difficult, which were: understanding the differences between models in a range, understanding the differences between trim options and seeing how the various combinations of models and
trims would affect the price they pay.

Somo’s goal was to direct a greater percentage of visitor traffic to the model pages, the configurator and the Quote My Audi page, which would indicate an improvement in these site journeys. Audi was struggling to maintain two separate sites (its desktop/tablet site and its mobile site), which were managed by two different agencies, and wanted to find a way of maximising efficiency by creating a single, responsive site.

Implementation, Execution & Tactics

Somo built a dedicated Agile team of Audi and Somo members, co-located to enable collaboration and the greatest productivity. This combined team
embarked on a ‘Sprint Zero’ together to define the site’s requirements and flesh out early concepts.

The agency analysed customer flows and traffic to understand where pages could be decommissioned or consolidated to create an easier user experience across the site. User research was continual and integrated into every sprint
to ensure a 100% customer-first approach.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 and React were employed to power cross-device adaptive experiences and bring efficiency. An emphasis on modern
DevOps processes and a close partnership with Audi’s back-end partner and internal IT team meant technical challenges could be overcome quickly. Meanwhile, the design team focused on solving the core customer needs by making comparison of models, trim options and prices simple, quick and easy.

Results

The Beta site initially launched to 20% of audi.co.uk visitors in October 2017, which was ramped up to 80% over the course of eight months. Since launch,
nearly 5m visitors have been directed to Beta.

Results show that compared to the existing site, Beta has been successful in driving visitors to the key areas and tools that are most important to Audi and its customers, including an 81% increase in visits to model pages, a 109% increase in visits to used cars, a 117% increase in visits to Quote My Audi and an 88% increase in visits to the Audi owners’ area of the site.