Progress Software

Progress Software increases opt-in rates with OneTrust A/B testing

The software provider boosted its opt-in rate while saving significant time and resources

Who is Progress Software?
What challenges was the company facing?

Who is Progress Software?

Progress Software provides the best products to develop, deploy, and manage high-impact business applications. With its customer-first focus, Progress Software is dedicated to helping organizations increase productivity and reduce risk by delivering cutting-edge products that its customers can rely on. With Progress Software, organizations can accelerate the creation and delivery of business-critical applications, automate processes to configure, deploy and scale those apps, and make data and content more accessible and secure – leading to competitive differentiation and business success. Beyond products, Progress Software is an experienced, trusted provider with the reliable support and resources necessary to help solve its customers’ toughest challenges.

With a global customer base, it is imperative for Progress Software to stay on top of the evolving privacy landscape. As a company, Progress Software prides themselves on its customer-first approach. Its team prioritized privacy and preference management across its websites as an essential component to building a trusted user experience.

“Initially we tried to conduct A/B testing on our own, by testing one banner across our sites every two weeks and monitor all acceptance rates. We found this manual process to be very tedious and challenging.”

Megan Gouveia, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing

What challenges was the company facing that led them to engage with OneTrust?

As a forward-thinking company Progress Software was ready to adapt to the changing privacy landscape. Progress Software utilizes a variety of OneTrust modules to maintain GDPR and CCPA compliance. Progress Software also uses OneTrust’s DSAR (Data Subject Access Rights) module to easily fulfill data subject and consumer rights requests.

Although GDPR was the initial catalyst that led Progress Software to OneTrust, followed eventually by CCPA, it was the challenges with consent rate optimization that strengthened the relationship between the two brands.

Progress Software uses OneTrust’s Cookie Consent module to create a trusted and personalized user experience across its five websites. Through OneTrust’s Cookie Consent module, Progress Software can tailor these cookie banners to its unique compliance needs as dictated by the various global privacy regulations that impact its users.

After implementing its cookie banners Progress Software's team set out on its own to increase opt-in consent rates across its domains while maintaining compliance. Its team originally spent months creating and implementing a plan to test opt-in rates and the variables that influence consent rates. This collaboration took efforts across systems and conferring with its legal team around compliant practices.

Megan Gouveia, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, described her team’s laborious process: “Initially we tried to conduct A/B testing on our own, by testing one banner across our sites every two weeks and monitor all acceptance rates. We found this manual process to be very tedious and challenging.”

“This solution made A/B testing much easier and more efficient for use. Now I can run the script for the greater time and have more of a chance to reach statistical significance. I can also run different tests on our sites to easily test different variables.”

Megan Gouveia, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing

Megan shared the challenges her team was facing during a Virtual Health Check, a service OneTrust provides to customers to review platform implementation and recommend configuration improvements. After this meeting, OneTrust stepped in and shared our A/B testing solution. Shortly after reviewing the tool, Megan and the team partnered with OneTrust to implement the A/B testing solution to begin testing cookie banner variants.

The teams launched an A/B/C experiment on Progress Software’s main website. Web visitors from Europe were randomly assigned one of the three cookie banner designs. The three designs included:

Modal Cookie Banner Popup – Web visitors must interact with the banner before accessing the site
Cookie Banner centered at the bottom of the webpage
Cookie Banner extended across the full-width bottom of the screen

By implementing OneTrust’s A/B testing solution Progress Software’s team was able to clearly visualize and understand opt-in patterns, “We were flying blind prior to implementing the A/B randomizer but through A/B testing we are able to get a better view on user interaction with the banner,” Megan said. After just one month of testing, Progress Software saw an opt-in increase of 20%. The team found that the modal pop-up had the highest performance with an average opt-in rate of 83% and an average opt-out rate of 2%. The next best-performing design was the bottom center cookie banner with an opt-in rate of 76% and an average opt-out of 1%.

“We were flying blind prior to implementing the A/B randomizer but through A/B testing we are able to get a better view on user interaction with the banner.”

Megan Gouveia, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing

Prior to working with OneTrust, Progress Software devoted hours and countless resources to better understand user interaction and consent rates. Through OneTrust’s A/B testing functionality Progress Software can easily test these variables to maximize opt-in rates. Looking ahead, after rolling out the new banner position, Progress Software will move on to conducting experiments testing variables like language, writing tone (formal vs informal), copy button locator, and button color to identify its fully optimized cookie banner.

Megan explains the impact implementing of leveraging OneTrust to conduct A/B testing had, “This solution made A/B testing much easier and more efficient for use. Now I can run the script for the greater time and have more of a chance to reach statistical significance. I can also run different tests on our sites to easily test different variables.”

Together, through a combination of technology solutions and collaboration, Progress Software and OneTrust were able to efficiently optimize consent rates. “The virtual health check gave us a forum to collaborate openly with OneTrust, sharing challenges we were having. OneTrust created tailored solutions for our challenges. This is a key service OneTrust offers that more people should take advantage of.” Megan said.

“The virtual health check opened up my eyes to challenges we were having and gave us a forum for us to collaborate with OneTrust openly. OneTrust created tailored solutions for our challenges. This is a key service OneTrust offers that more people should take advantage of.”

Megan Gouveia, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing