GoCentral Strawberry Jam

GoDaddy

Role

UX Designer
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
UX Researcher

Tools

Sketch
After Effects
Indesign
Adobe Illustrator
Invision
UserTesting.com
Principle

Problem

Godaddy’s bread and butter has always been domain name registrations while other products, like GoCentral, took a back seat. We looked into the domain purchasing behaviors and discovered of the small business owners who were purchasing domains, only a fraction of them renewed their domain. This behavior highlighted a tremendous opportunity to boost revenue and engagement with GoDaddy products, which were two KPI’s that the business was looking to improve for the year.

Hypothesis

If we allow small business owners to create a coming soon page with GoCentral, then they will renew their domain at the end of the year.

At first glance, the response may have been to improve the domain renewal process somehow. Looking deeper into the data we noticed a correlation. Of the people who renewed their domain, most of them have activated it and are using it on at least one product. Inversely, the people who didn’t renew their domain hadn’t enabled any products on their domain.

The data seemed to suggest the lack of domain renewal was a symptom of a bigger problem, small business owners weren’t using their domains. Working on the GoDaddy’s GoCentral growth team, we saw this as an opportunity to solve the larger organization problem while still achieving our team product goal of increased GoCentral activations of increased GoCentral activations.

KPIs

  • Increase in GoCentral Activation

  • Increase in publish rate

  • Small business owners finding immediate value in their new domain

  • Small business owners returning to finish their idea on their domain

Solution

Coming Soon
& Receipt Page Experience

Initial Results

Since the first 6 weeks, we’ve seen a 108% increase on GoCentral’s activation rate over the past year. Also we saw an 88% increase in GoCentral’s website publish rates over the past 3 months.

Shipped Experience

After seeing the difficulty users had understanding the concept of a “Coming Soon” feature on top of their site, we decided to test an experience that provided users with a “Coming Soon” template.

We knew the experience after publish would be crucial in convincing small business owners to take action with their new domain. We had to find the right balance of marketing and guidance to achieve this goal. After doing a competitive analysis of other purchasing experiences, I stumbled on the concept of a new space. 

Purchasing a domain and building on it are two different mindsets. Concepts that added to the purchase experience further exhausted the purchasing mindset and concepts that dropped users into the building mindset didn’t prime for the switch. After testing concepts with small business owners, we landed on a concept of a new domain space after domain purchase to guide small business owners into the building mindset.