Impact Dog Crates is a direct-to-consumer brand that sells high-quality, heavy-duty aluminum dog crates and accessories. Through years of product innovation and testing, Impact Dog Crates has designed and created leading dog crates for everything from airline travel to at-home use. The brand also touts a High Anxiety Crate, built for dogs that suffer from separation anxiety, which has proven to be a key differentiator for their business.
Although the company has made a big impression within the pet supply industry, the Impact Dog Crates team is still lean, which means that most of their employees are tasked with several roles and responsibilities. This is especially true for McKinley Hancock, Impact Dog Crates’ Web Developer, who in addition to designing and coding the brand’s site, also leads conversion rate optimization (CRO) at the company.
The broad scope of his role paired with the focus on driving conversions through the website, made it key for McKinley to identify an optimization solution that would allow him to make impactful changes to the website quickly. Additionally, because McKinley intends to offload the brand’s CRO program onto a new hire in the future, he was motivated to find a codeless solution so future operators could make changes to the site without needing extensive coding skills.
Building a homepage that has an impact
"Previously, most visitors only spent two minutes on our website. With this experiment, we increased time on site 4x which ultimately led to higher conversion rates.”
- McKinley Hancock, Web Developer
Given his experience using Intellimize at a previous company, McKinley knew the AI-driven optimization solution would be a great fit for Impact Dog Crates’ needs. After signing on with Intellimize, the first area of focus was improving conversion rates on its homepage.
Before, the brands’ homepage featured a hero image with a specific dog breed and a headline promoting a deal on a certain color of dog crates. With Intellimize, McKinley was able to test a hero image featuring a different dog breed and several headline combinations. And, within just two weeks, a new variation became the clear winner.
To create a seamless ad-to-homepage experience, they launched a digital ad campaign featuring the winning image and messaging and tracked those who clicked on ads with UTM parameters. Intellimize’s targeting functionality allowed Impact Dog Crates to show the same version of the homepage to those who clicked on the ad for continuity.
Before this experiment, visitors spent around two minutes on their site in total. Post experiment, users were spending upwards of 10 minutes browsing multiple pages, reading product descriptions, adding to cart and checking out quickly.
Through this experiment, Impact Dog Crates saw sales double with a 2% conversion rate on the homepage.
Using AI tools to unleash conversion potential
The AI copy suggest functionality has been integral to my process. It helps me generate ideas, which I can then enhance leading to faster results.
- McKinley Hancock, Web Developer
For Impact Dog Crates, AI-driven optimization features have been key to the brand’s CRO strategy. This allows McKinley to set up experiences that dynamically serve the right variation of the website to the right visitor at the right time.
Impact Dog Crates also leverages the AI copy suggest functionality built directly into the Intellimize Visual Editor to create new copy variations. The team uses AI copy suggest to generate ideas, then takes the outputs and modifies them to fit whatever situation they’re writing for. With Intellimize’s suite of codeless, AI-powered tools, it’s easy for the Impact Dog Crates team to ideate quickly and achieve results much faster than with traditional A/B testing.
Spending more time experimenting, and less time coding
The Shopify integration with Intellimize was so easy to install... we were up and running in less than an hour!
- McKinley Hancock, Web Developer
In addition to its AI-driven capabilities, Intellimize’s integration with Shopify is another critical benefit the brand has been able to leverage. The integration automatically captures purchase activities to make it faster and easier for the team at Impact Dog Crates to identify optimization opportunities.
With 10 experiments live and 30 variations running on their site at any time, the future of website optimization is bright at Impact Dog Crates. This quarter, they plan to test out new CTA button colors and pricing changes. And after having already seen an 80% increase in conversions since last year, there’s no doubt that Impact Dog Crates will use Intellimize to execute their new experiments.