Straightforward Content by Sitecore
Confused.com, owned by parent company Inspop.com Ltd, is a fast growing comparison website for insurance products in the United Kingdom. The Confused.com website was launched to help consumers wade through the often laborious process of comparing complex car insurance. The popularity of the website has led to the expansion of products and services available for comparison. Individuals and businesses can now use Confused.com for many different insurance types such as: car, home, pet, landlord, motorbike, van, small business and medical. Other products and services include: digital TV, broadband, mobile, landlines, utilities, loans, savings accounts and more. Confused.com aggregates massive volumes of information to help consumers compare a vast array of products and services – a process which has historically been found laborious.
The rapid and sizeable growth of Confused.com outgrew a once sufficient yet poorly implemented legacy CMS. Attempts to build extensions onto the CMS had provided short term solutions that eventually became blockers to more expansive upgrades. Confused.com needed to migrate to a highly scalability CMS that could quickly adapt to a rapidly growing and increasingly competitive marketplace.
“ The migration to Sitecore’s system has been great news for Confused.com’s digital marketing team. Through working with our Sitecore-trained IT team, we now have a user-friendly, flexible CMS system that the whole team can use to make proactive and responsive changes to the site, to support our digital marketing strategy. „
- Heledd Jones, Digital Marketing Manager, Confused.com
Challenge
Confused.com was faced with a challenge experienced by many companies reliant on their websites for business growth – in the early 2000s companies generally purchased bespoke CMS or tasked their internal IT teams to build custom CMS to meet their specific business needs.
With such a diverse selection of products and services on offer, the content editors at Confused.com found it increasingly prohibitive to have such a great reliance on their IT department for content changes or additions. The design of the original CMS restricted the ability of Confused.com to re-use content or create new pages to meeting business needs or they developed. In a highly competitive market these constraints were prohibitive to enabling the marketing team to deliver the best Return on Investment possible.
The technology selections of recent years did not envision future technologies, or the potential volume of business transacting on their websites, thus these systems do not have the power, scalability or flexible integration opportunities that can be found today in products like Sitecore WCM.
Solution
Eager to deliver a greater volume of products and services in the fast growing product comparison marketplace, Confused.com researched WCM solutions beginning in September 2009. The Confused.com team identified five critically important areas for their CMS selection process:
- Synergy in platforms (.NET)
- Price
- Compelling feature-set
- Culture and personality
- Commitment to developers and R&D
Efficient Website Development
Confused.com built a proof-of-concept for the credit card comparison section to gain commitments from credit card providers to participate in the comparison program.
Sitecore Certification Expertise
Confused.com structured the content migration project to cover all major sections of the website. In addition to hiring a Sitecore Certified consultant, Confused.com sent several employees to Sitecore Developer training to ensure the content migration process was executed proficiently and on-time while adhering to best practices.
Result
Productivity
The newly developed Sitecore CMS vastly improved the ability for editors to publish pages without technical support. Following the implementation of Sitecore CMS, content editors have been able to launch over 400 landing pages and guides versus approximately 20 launched during the same period the year prior.
Scalability
With Sitecore the new web infrastructure is more scalable and currently able to comfortably support 8x more daily traffic.
Flexibility
The Sitecore CMS allows Confused.com content editors to adopt more sophisticated marketing strategies to deliver more engaging marketing campaigns. Content editors have also experienced increased productivity with a wide array of page templates and the ability to quickly repurpose content.
Search Engine Optimization
Confused.com recognised the benefits of Sitecore’s native SEO-friendly structure and SEO module which helps Confused.com editors maintain and improve Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) while adding or updating content. Total organic search engine visits were up 48% in the 6 months following the deployment of Sitecore CMS.
Cost
With the adoption of Sitecore CMS the licensing and contractor costs were delivered within budget. Confused.com has been able to reduce the frequency of IT involvement in content administration and content publishing which greatly reduces the overall costs of maintaining the website.
Solution Special Ingredients
- Sitecore CMS 6.3
- .NET 3.5, JQuery 1.4.3, CSS
- Google Analytics
- Pluck 4