Case Study

EnergySage Develops Offline Conversions

Founded
2009

Industry
Renewable Energy

Headquarters
Boston, MA

 

About EnergySage

EnergySage is the leading online marketplace for rooftop solar, solar batteries, and community solar. The marketplace connects solar shoppers with vetted installers, aggregates quotes, and presents offers for customers to review and comparison-shop. EnergySage seeks to make “going solar as easy as booking a flight online.” So, optimizing the digital experience is fundamental to the EnergySage mission. As part of this effort, EnergySage began using SiteSpect for digital optimization in 2018. Because of SiteSpect’s architecture and services, they have been able to find some creative ways to optimize their site that wouldn’t be available with other tools.

As Jacob Marsh, Digital Marketing Manager at EnergySage says, “As someone who isn’t really a technical person, SiteSpect is robust enough that it allows us to do anything we may need on our site, but intuitive enough that I can handle most of it myself. When I can’t, the support set up is great, and we’ve had some really interesting problem-solving sessions.” 

In this case, EnergySage faced an interesting dilemma when it came to tracking their most valuable KPI: approved form submissions. They worked with SiteSpect to come up with an out-of-the-box solution that solved the problem.

“SiteSpect is robust enough that it allows us to do anything we may need on our site, but intuitive enough that I can handle most of it myself. When I can’t, the support set up is great, and we’ve had some really interesting problem solving sessions.” 

Jacob Marsh, Digital Marketing Manager

When Your KPI Isn’t the Full Picture

One of EnergySage’s primary conversions is their registration form that users must fill out in order to receive quotes. While this seems fairly straightforward, filling out the form is only the first step in the conversion process. Once a user submits their zip code along with some additional information, it must then be reviewed by an EnergySage employee who verifies that service is available in the given area and for the given circumstance. While it’s easy to count total form submissions from the website, this metric doesn’t actually reflect revenue — the more accurate metric is approved submissions. However, the final step of approval is handled by an EnergySage employee outside of the website flow, via the company’s backend CRM software. At this point, verified customers are notified that they've been approved and can begin receiving quotes.

The original approach to tracking conversions in SiteSpect was a straightforward URL match on the registration page, effectively measuring all form submissions. However, with some creative problem solving, EnergySage and SiteSpect were able to come up with a way to track only approved conversions.

Developing a New Approval Metric

Because the onboarding flow — which is where the registration form sits — is subject to change based on other experiments EnergySage runs, the team wanted to find a way to tie the approval step back to the correct campaigns and variation groups. So, together with their SiteSpect consultant, they thought outside of the box. 

SiteSpect offers an Engine API, and EnergySage developers built a workflow using the Engine API to track activity from their website and follow it through that manual approval process in their CRM. When a user submits a form with EnergySage, their SiteSpect cookie and a SiteSpect user id are picked up with the Engine API, which can then be stored in their CRM or other analytics system. Then, the team created a metric in SiteSpect that captures the manual approval with its own metric id. When a submission is manually approved by an EnergySage employee, a SiteSpect Engine API call is made that includes both the user’s SiteSpect cookie and SiteSpect user id, and references the metric id. This then gets recorded in SiteSpect’s analytics as a conversion attributed to the original campaign and the user that submitted the form.

Opportunities for Optimization

Now that EnergySage is able to track the metrics that matter the most to them as a company, they can begin to see even greater results from their optimization efforts that they wouldn’t have access to with another optimization tool. Rather than simply tracking the gross number of form submissions, they are able to optimize specifically for valid submissions — a metric that actually translates to revenue for the company.

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