WCG

WCG’s clinical research services maximize the speed and cost-efficiency of clinical trials. For more than 50 years, WCG has guided organizations through the clinical trial process, from patient engagement and site selection to study planning, analytics, and reviews (ethical, scientific, and regulatory).

As their suite of products expanded, however, their website became less successful at clearly conveying the power of WCG’s platforms. They engaged 10up for a site redesign that efficiently guides customers to the right solutions.

Onsite Insights

10up often starts projects by visiting the client team for a series of onsite workshops, as building relationships with our partners is crucial to the success of our projects. During the onsite workshops, WCG’s Chief Marketing Officer shared an overview of their business goals, the project objectives, and its desired impact. Discussions also addressed the site’s visitor personas and core information architecture. This led directly to detailed plans for revamping the content strategy, navigation menus, and iconography.

Six-Sided Stats

WCG wanted the redesign to unify their branding. 10up found that unifying element on WCG’s walls. The team was inspired by their office design, with frosted glass and bold hexagons.

The honeycomb pattern proved ideal for displaying infographics. Each service and solution landing page got its own set of illustrative statistics.

The website design matches their brand from the doors of their office to the last line of code. WCG staff liked the hexagon-based statistics design so much they began using the images in presentations and sales material.

Everything Is Editable

To provide the utmost flexibility in content management and page creation, 10up developed a modular, block-based page editor. It offered a choice of column layouts and a flexible component library to easily embed their external content, Wistia videos, Eventbrite events, and Marketo CRM forms. The new site enables the marketing team to cost-effectively fine-tune page elements, down to the individual icons inside the hexagons.

Uberflip Integration

While the main WCG site (wcgclinical.com) was WordPress-powered, another “Resources” site, housing their extensive collection of case studies sat at a subdomain (insights.wcgclinical.com) on the Uberflip platform. The marketing team liked using Uberflip’s flipbooks but the dual domains hurt their SEO and domain authority. 10up’s task was to make the two sites seem like one.

On the front-end, 10up built an Uberflip shell, with header/footer templates matching the new WordPress redesign. 10up worked directly with the Uberflip tech team to install and refine the branded design of the Resources site. The Uberflip company featured 10up’s branding technique in the use-case article, “How to Use Uberflip to Execute Your ABM Campaigns at Scale.”

10up also wrote a custom external-content block to pull the Uberflip titles into WordPress. WCG editors could then select from these titles to display in a Resources box at the main WordPress site (see the Study Fast-Start landing page).

On the back-end, 10up engineers enhanced performance by migrating Uberflip files to Amazon Web Services. Redirecting flipbook URLs to a main-site subfolder (“Insights”) boosted the SEO. and site searches were blended to display combined results from the two databases (WordPress and Uberflip) on a single search-results page.

Menus Made Mega

Web analytics showed a high bounce rate for the existing landing pages—many visitors who entered the site through a landing page never clicked to view another page.

10up hypothesized the original menu dropdowns contained too many links, which increases cognitive load on visitors and makes it hard for them to decide where to go next. 10up also suspected the header menu wasn’t properly directing visitors to the information they sought, as the terminology of the Services was in WCG’s technical language rather than in user layman’s terms.

These hypotheses proved testable and fixable. Keyword analysis for terms such as “clinical services” revealed related, common Google-search trends. Tweaking the menu-item wordings, and running Google Optimize A/B tests on mega-menu design variants, produced a simpler set of links with a more customer-focused link text.

Launch And Learn

The redesigned site successfully modernized the WCG brand. Within a couple months, they saw significant increases in SEO, website traffic, and service-page conversion rates, with a decreased homepage bounce rate.

Half the visitors were now scrolling past the page fold with one-third of mobile users scrolling to the footer — 19% tapped a footer link. Remapping the recruitment pages proved particularly effective: 65% of all clicks on the Careers page went directly to a position listing (76% on mobile).

“One of our partners absolutely raved about the new website design. He thought the information was great, the layout was great, and the variety and novelty of thought leadership with white papers and videos was really impressive.”

— WCG Executive

The launch, however, was only part of the site redesign. 10up’s UX team compiled three months of post-launch Google Analytics data and conducted 2,000 recorded visitor sessions, examining heatmaps and realtime user behaviors. This led to further rounds of recommendations and refinements.

Because even small fixes can impact the design elsewhere, before each new release, 10up ran visual regression tests to compare screenshots of site versions and highlight visual differences.

Several months later, a performance audit yielded gratifying results:

• Direct traffic increased 76% year-over-year
• Organic Search traffic increased 44% year-over-year
• Referral traffic increased 209% year-over-year
• Social Media traffic increased 1,076% year-over-year

Multilingual Multisite

As part of its ongoing support program, 10up continues to expand the WCG brand. WCG has numerous subsidiaries and an international audience. For WCG companies outside the United States, 10up researched available tools to find the solution that fit WCG’s requirements; one that uses Google’s Neural Machine Translations. The plugin was then configured and customized to integrate with the new custom content blocks.

An ROI Calculator is also in the works: It’s a lead generator that applies the company’s advanced, proprietary algorithms to demonstrate how clients can save money using WCG services.

“We’re going through annual evaluations right now. We got a ton done and a lot of that is due to 10up. So thank you for a very successful year. The web project definitely got a lot of praise from the board, from the executive team, and from the [marketing] department. We made a really good impression on where the company and the department is headed. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

— David Vogel, WCG Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics

In recent years 10up has expanded its services to include clients in highly regulated industries, a particular focus is healthcare services, from multinational organizations like WCG to mid-size agencies like PIXACORE to nonprofits like Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. To discuss ways your organization can turn complicated legacy systems into modern, flexible digital platforms, contact us.