Case: De Telegraaf & Metro

Growth hacking in a high-traffic environment

For an A/B test I changed the menu on the fly with a little JS and CSS magic

De Telegraaf is Holland's biggest newspaper site with over 1,5 million visitors per day.

We devised and tested interface improvements

Many stakeholders vie for the precious time of the development team. That is why we had to be sure that any proposed changes would be worth their while.

By changing the appearance of email forms we had many times over 100% extra sign-ups

At De Telegraaf, and their other subsidiary, metro.nl, I did extensive testing in Visual Website Optimizer (VWO). This platform allows for comprehensive tests in both CSS and Javascript.

Tests were carefully planned based on input from all the stakeholders, with technical difficulty and importance of the changes envisioned in mind.

As VWO is a comprehensive tool, I could code elaborate tests, such as on-the-fly rebuilding of a horizontal menu into a slide-in hamburger menu, adding a list of top-5 articles beneath each article or moving an article to the top of the page.

New app download visuals

In a one-page AJAX environment this often called for elaborate timer scripts, but the tests were worth the effort.

Increasing email subscriptions

The email subscription forms were rather dull. By spicing them up and targeting them at specific news events, such as a royal wedding, we drastically incremented the subscription rate.

Increasing app downloads

A make-over of the app download visuals in the Apple Store and on Google Play significantly increased the number of downloads.