Post-click optimization of Mobile.de
Project date: 2021
Mobile.de a Ebay company
In 2020, mobile.de was Germany’s leading online vehicle marketplace, attracting about ≃16 million unique monthly visitors.
Despite COVID-19 disruptions, it was still the main website to go when selling a car, and dealers across Germany sold over half of all used cars through the platform.
Mobile.de recorded at that time approximately €329 million in revenue. Mobile.de was a central part of eBay’s European “motors” vertical. Its scale, strong dealer relationships, and brand recognition made it a cornerstone of eBay’s broader digital-classifieds ecosystem across Europe’s e-commerce and mobility markets.
The challenge
I joined eBay to work on the Mobile.de vertical at their Berlin Europa Park campus. I was interested in working in a different industry from telecommunications ( see what I did at Vodafone ), and I was striving for new challenges.
At Mobile.de I was part of the acquisition cross-functional team, we were tasked specifically with the responsibility to optimize across the platform the performance of our advertisement placements, as well as the redirection of traffic to the native applications in IOS & Android.
At that time, it was a question of how to be more efficient and convert more of the traffic we were receiving from direct marketing, since the budgets were being optimized.
My contribution optimizing the platform
Initial research
The first step I took in the project was to do some research, first internally interviewing the organization stakeholders, then looking into data, like what were the main sources of traffic and landing pages, and lastly identifying opportunities for optimization.
Two main issues were clear to me:
1. The home page had fallen behind in terms of visual design and hero banner optimization. We could offer our partners, like the car brands worked with a much better hero placement.
2. We were not promoting across the website the native application enough, which had much better user engagement metrics than the website and generated better revenues through in-app advertising.
Proposal for a new home Hero
We did have the space, but we were not using it properly. I designed a completely new concept that focused on bringing the key elements of the hero forward visually.
• A centered layout, which will open the opportunity to use full-page hero banners. This was one of the website bookings that generated the most revenue.
• A stronger highlight of USP’s. “German biggest” was a core message. Also, our key services at the time, “Express-selling” dealership partner program, and our advertising booking must be promoted.
I learned a lot of things in a short period at eBay. One of the highlights was to see the power of A/B testing when properly defined and conducted. I would take this elarning with me further in my career.
Promotion of the Native applications
With the performance of the session in mind. I also designed an app-install modal, simple design and direct communication. After looping with the team back and forth, we came up with 2 solutions, which we tested with a multi-variant A/B test.
The core question behind this design was:
Would the addition of the USP’s create any further uplift in native installs?.
Milestones and impact
30% YoY unpaid App install
Aditional user egagement in app core metrics
Aditional advertising revenues
Thanks for giving it the time to look at this project. Special thanks for; Robert Sawyer, Peter Amende & Arik Edelstein among other great people I got to work with at Mobile.de