MAY 11, 2017
Wego.com increases mobile conversion rates 95% with AMP
Wego.com is the largest travel marketplace in the Middle East and Asia Pacific, with headquarters in Dubai and Singapore as well as regional offices in Bangalore and Jakarta. Wego makes it easy for people to compare travel costs in an instant from hundreds of global and local partners, including airlines, hotels, travel agents, and travel suppliers.
Wego’s travel app tops popularity ratings. However, the mobile web remains a critical channel. “The mobile web has wide reach, especially in our core markets where it’s common to have slow, unstable networks and low phone storage space of 512MBs or less,” notes Honey Mittal, Senior Vice President of Product at Wego. “In these markets, travel planning is not a daily necessity for most, which often results in people removing less frequently used apps to make space for photos and videos.”
On the mobile web, the main challenge for Wego was speed. Shopping for airfares and hotels online is frustrating when pages load slowly. To help Wego’s site load faster, the company found a solution in AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
Solution
To start, Wego created AMP versions of key landing pages designed to support popular queries, such as “cheap flights to Hong Kong.” Then, Wego built a full PWA experience to continue engaging customers beyond the AMP landing pages. They hypothesized AMP pages would engage potential customers at the beginning of their journey, and then PWA functionality would help prospects easily compare travel deals before they completed their bookings on Wego’s travel partners’ sites.
Results
Implementing AMP delivered significant speed improvements to Wego’s mobile web experience. Page-load speeds decreased from more than 11 seconds to less than one second with AMP. Faster page loads also led to reduced bounce rates and, most importantly, higher conversion rates for Wego and their partners. “By delivering a lightning fast mobile website experience,” Mittal shares, “Wego has solved an enormous problem for our users who weren’t able to download or retain our app, as well as our travel partners.”
Conversion rates also increased across the board: conversion rates to partner sites went up 95%, and search-to-conversion rates improved 49%. “The results validated our efforts,” says Mittal. “To build on the improved performance we saw with AMP pages, we began using the amp-ad component, which places ads on AMP pages. They’re moving the needle as well—improving the clickthrough rate (CTR) for our advertisers from .75% to nearly 2.55%.”
Today, Wego is putting AMP technology to work, and it’s paying off in a better experience for its users, and more business for its travel suppliers and marketing partners. “Speed was a critical challenge for our mobile business,” notes Mittal. “AMP solves speed, so we can focus on building a better product for our customers.”