[Music] [Ed Kennedy] My name is Ed Kennedy. I am a Principal Product Marketing Manager here at Adobe Commerce. I am really fortunate, and as you will see, you're very fortunate to have Matt here from Canon talking about their implementation over the last couple of years of Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager. I'm going to go through a couple of pieces of material, and I'm going to get out of the way and get Matt up here so we can dive into all the great content that he's prepared. So just giving you a little bit of a rundown. Matt will talk about Canon, the OneWeb Project, the four objectives that were center of what they were trying to accomplish, what that turned into in terms of their holiday results, and then we'll wrap up with what's next for Canon and what's coming for Adobe Commerce. But before we dive in, I wanted to start with a live poll, so I'm going to put you right on the spot for some live audience participation. You can scan this QR code or go to polleve.com/edkennedy, and select one or all of the options from the drop-down list here. So grab that QR code. We want to get an understanding of what growth strategies are working in your business right now. You can select one or you can select multiple. Is it email marketing, SEO, improved site performance? Just give us a sense. And for everyone here, what are the strategies that are working for you? And this is updating dynamically, of course. So I think it's just always good to know who's in the room and what other people are focusing on. So it looks like we've got SEO, site performance, conversion rate optimization. Thank you, guys, so much for putting in these responses. It's great for us to get an understanding. Okay. So site performance, SEO, email marketing, promotions, pretty broad across the board, but site performance is definitely something that's working for people right now. And still more results coming in fresh from the Internet. Okay. Great. Thank you, guys, so much for providing that context for us. I think that helps me and helps Matt sort of understand what is working for you, and we can apply that to what we're going to talk about today. So without further ado, I would like to invite up Matt from Canon. Please give a round of applause for Matt.

[Matthew Mandato] Thanks, man. I swear I'm going to jump off the stage right now or I'm going to sit down. But the one thing I love about Matt is that he came to Las Vegas and then drove out to Zion to go camping. It's true. So I think that gave me a first impression of Matt that this guy is someone I would want to sit down and have a drink with, that he comes to Vegas and doesn't go gambling, actually goes out and does some camping. So it's been great to chat with you more and get to know you a little more, so take it away. Thanks, Ed. Honestly, I'm terrible at gambling. If we sat at a poker table, I would just cut to the chase. I'd just hand you money, like whatever. But, yeah, thank thanks, Ed. Thanks for a great introduction. Like you said, I'm Matt Mandato. I'm from Canon. I'm a manager on the IT side. I'm in charge of Adobe Commerce and our PIM application, Akeneo, and a few other things to help out with AEM. And, yeah. I'm going to tell you about our project here. So a little information about Canon, founded in 1937. And one of the interesting things that I found out when I joined Canon, right, I always thought it was just cameras and printers, but we're in the medical industry. We have industrial and semiconductor. It's a super diverse product line. So I'll talk a little bit about that in the presentation as well and how we handled that. So keep going. So this is a little story time. I'm going to start off with a little story time. So I'm going to tell you a story about two websites that were destined to be together, but they just didn't know it yet. Our first website is our Canon corporate website. It was a wonderful place where customers can come and learn about products and download some drivers, get support, read some articles.

But it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns. It was, it had its faults just like you and me.

The catalog was tough to navigate. Mobile experience was all right. And it was also missing a key feature, ecom. Now let me tell you about the second website, our ecom website. It was also a magical place where customers can come and learn about our products and read articles and buy stuff.

But it was often overshadowed by its older brother, the corporate side, especially in search engines and especially with SEO. And if you notice, they don't really look a whole lot alike, so we're missing some brand consistency. And, yeah, the tech stack was outdated. I mean, I don't know if any of you remember Flash, but the backend of it was still running on Flash. So, pretty wild, right? And both of these required a team of specialized skills, like frontend development, public published content. In fact, we actually needed a team for each one of these websites. But then one special day in August of 2022, Canon did something amazing. We combined these two websites into one website called OneWeb. You see. You probably see how we got there, right? But OneWeb is not just the website, right? It's not just combining these two sites, but it was a huge project for us, right? It was combining of tons of content, working across teams across the entire organization, getting people to talk to each other that have never spoken to each other, didn't even know existed. And it was tons of work across everyone. I'm sure my colleagues are going to, or some of them are here, some of them are going to listen to it later. So I definitely appreciate all the hard work that everyone put in. It really was a tough but rewarding journey.

Yeah. So I broke it down into four main sections I want to talk about, right? We want to improve our user experience. We want to modernize our tech stack. We wanted to empower the business, and we wanted to improve our organic traffic. So improving the user experience, how do we do this? So I mentioned people couldn't really find products too well on the old website. It was tough to navigate. This is a screenshot of our old menu, the mega menu. And if you notice, it's a little tough to navigate. If you tried to go find an inkjet printer here, it would be a little bit tough. But the reason why it was structured like this is because this is how our organization was structured, right? We had a team for laser printers. We had a team for cameras, a team for inkjet printers. And they were all in different divisions, so they weren't even on the same team. So some might call it shaping the org chart, right, Ed? So when we created OneWeb, we really wanted to smooth out this approach, right? We wanted to put ourselves into the shoes of the customer to make data as seamless as possible. So this is the new website, right? This is OneWeb. And if you notice at the top there, we have the menu, and it's very straightforward, right? You want a camera? There's cameras. You want printers? There's printers. And we added imagery and just tried to make it as smooth as possible, make it easy to find what you're looking for. And, Matt, how many different teams are underneath those printing groups? Like, to get that printing nav to work, you had like how many different divisions in printing are represented there? What was it? Like something like six. Like it was huge. Yeah. There's Canon's, we have a lot of different teams pretty siloed, but I'll get into that in a second. Yes. Yeah. Thanks, Ed.

Yeah. And we also had several different verticals, right? We had, we have our consumer, right, B2C. We have our business aside, so enterprise printing, industrial, semiconductor, things like that. And then we have pro, right? We have cinema products and broadcasting and professional photography, things like that. So what we did is we split out the website into three different sections, and this was to make sure that the users using the website are getting the experience that they expect and seeing the content that they need and optimizing their workflow.

But we also needed governance, right? It couldn't be the wild west. That was kind of one of the problems with the old website is, no one was really talking to each other. No experience was similar. We had many different teams publishing content. So if you notice similar look and feel with some minor changes, different metting, headings, and it was-- We found it's pretty effective.

So our mobile experience, right? I talked a little bit about our mobile experience earlier, and this was the mobile experience on the old websites, right? We had the old ecom, and we had the old corporate website, and it was a little bit confusing. Again, they didn't really look alike, so you didn't really know what site you were on sometimes. People actually didn't trust the shop website at some points, because of how different it looked, and the URL was different. Also, there's tons of call to actions. It wasn't super clear what you should click. So what we did with OneWeb is we tried to smooth it out, right? We tried to make it a seamless experience, quick bite sized information, clear calls to action. You know exactly what you're doing. We added a buy now button to make a frictionless checkout, and we work to improve performance as well, right? As you saw, that's working for a lot of you. So, yeah, we're pretty excited about this. We really did try to do a mobile first approach. And what did this result in? Right? We're talking about metrics in this session. So when we compare holiday of last year versus holiday of 2019, which was like kind of the last normal year for us, that's why we did that. Yeah. We got a huge bump in conversion rate, so 63% increase and a 124% increase in transactions. So just smoothing out those journeys, smoothing out that experience, focusing attention to the right places on PDPs really did help.

Another metric we have is the Net Promoter Score. So what the Net Promoter Score is or NPS is, how likely someone is to recommend this website to somebody else. This is an important stat for our call center. So if you notice, it's way better, right? It significantly improved between the time we launched and now, but we wanted to call out all the different deployments in between when we launched and the success because launching is not the end of it, right? Nothing comes out of the gate perfect. So we had to optimize. We had to improve a lot of experiences. And over the course of, about a year, it got a lot better. People were pretty happy with it. Call volume was down, saving us a little bit of money. So all good things here.

So what do we learn? Right? So, again, we had a solid organization. We have a B2B team, a B2C team with all diverse product lines, all diverse needs. So we needed something that would allow for flexibility but also allow for governance. So that's why we chose AEM in the first place and why we chose commerce is because it empowered us to have that governance, right? We had components, experience fragments, working seamlessly with our, with Adobe Commerce to give us that experience.

And not everyone's going to agree with every user experience decision, right? Not everyone thinks the same way, but the important thing is to gather data, right, to do your market research and do A/B testing. And we've recently implemented Target pretty recently, and we're excited to have more ability to do A/B testing. So if someone has an idea, but it's not really fully fleshed out or we're not a 100% sure if it's going to work, we could test it and see the metrics and really get the feedback that we need. I know it's been a popular conversation at Summit. And then last thing, right, siloed organization. Don't wait for your org structure to change. It's not always going to come from top down. Just be the central hub. Give people a place to talk to each other, maybe call a meeting. I have a meeting every two weeks where we bring all the different business groups together. We talk about what they want. We talk about their needs, so everyone is on the same page. We're thinking about Canon as a whole, what's best for the organization, not just what's best for your team. So I encourage all of you to be and create that central hub.

So, again, we wanted to modernize our tech stack, right? I mentioned how outdated the backend was. It didn't really give us the functionality we needed. And why modernize? Right? It's a big process. So, obviously, security updates, Adobe puts out pretty routine security patches so we can feel comfortable knowing we're safe. We wanted to centralize our data and assets. We have all of our products, regardless if they're sellable or not in Adobe Commerce with all of their information. We also have it in our PIM. So people can go to one place to get all the information they need. Ease of integration, right? You saw on the floor how many apps and vendors and agencies make it smooth and easy. They think commerce first, right, or they think the Adobe Stack first. There's a lot of out of the box plugins and things like that. So when we want to integrate new features, we know that it'll be easy enough to do that. Someone at that company or that vendor would know how to integrate with Adobe Commerce and AEM. Again, I talked about A/B testing and personalization, something we didn't really have in the past, and we want it to be future proof. The Adobe stack is obviously here for the future. They're on the bleeding edge, so we're pretty excited about that.

So what did we learn? Right? Well, we implemented our PIM at the same time that we launched these two applications and brought the sites together. We're doing all this content work as well. So don't bite off more than you could chew, right? That was a little crazy of us to do, but we did it. We got through it. Migrating years of content, right, so they're all stored in different formats. We had stuff that was just raw HTML. We have things that were templated. We have things in applications that nobody really touched. So what we had to do is it's a Marie Kondo our content. Does it spark joy? Right? Is the data there? Are people interacting with it? Does it create value? So cut the dead weight, bring just what's helping you.

And then we also have a custom ERP system that caused some challenges, and really, we just had to kind of power through it and test and collaborate closely with that team internally. So, yeah, I can't overemphasize testing. We caught a lot of things before it went out, so.

Next, we wanted to empower the business, right? As I mentioned, everything had to go through these web ops teams, and with these special skills. And what happened was it caused bottlenecking, right? And it slowed down our ability to publish content, slowed down our speed to market. And while it worked, it wasn't perfect. We wanted people, we wanted our marketers to be able to publish content as quickly as they thought of it or got it approved.

So here's just a quick demo. I'm sure some of you use AEM. It's nothing crazy, but this is just me editing an experience fragment. I really felt like this title needed an exclamation point at the end. I didn't think it hit hard enough. So that's what I did here. But you saw it, it's easy. You don't really, you don't need any frontend development, you just click, make the change, click publish, and you're done.

So as you saw, you couldn't really change the structure of the components. So, again, there is our governance, right? So what do we learn when we empower the business? When you're giving people new capabilities, you are essentially changing their job, right? So with that, what we had to do is we had to show the capabilities and the values. You have to get by, and you can't just tell people they have new responsibilities, right? You had to show, this is exciting. This is going to be good for you. This is going to make your life easier. This is going to help our customers and our users. So you have to become a little bit of a salesman internally.

There's a learning curve, right? People aren't born knowing how to use these applications. They're easy enough to learn, but you need to learn them, right? So that's a lot of training, a lot of documentation, a lot of patience. You will be asked questions more than one time of the same thing, but just be there to help people and document. So you could send them the link the Confluence links or whatever. And then you also want to document responsibilities and set those expectations upfront. That's just life advice, right? Just front load things. It's way better off that way. But, yeah, I mean, having those clear understanding of who's going to take care of what, what IT is going to take, what business is going to take, is super important. So no button heads.

And lastly, we wanted to improve our organic traffic. Now this was a big one, right? Google did not know what to do with us. It's like we have the same page three or four times, the same content in different articles. And Google said, should I rank this page? Should I rank that page? You know what? Let's get these out of here. Let's just rank Best Buy or Amazon, right? So that was really important for us. We needed to have good quality SEO, and, honestly, bringing these two sites together really worked out. So here is our organic traffic over time. These little gray boxes are things that we did to help out, whether it be content fixes, technical fixes, and then there's also algorithm changes in there and how those affected us. But if you notice, it went up, right? It was pretty impressive. We were very excited. This is what we were hoping for the whole time. This is what we were selling internally the whole time that this is like the Holy Grail, right? This is where we're going. We want more efficient sales. We want more efficient marketing. So this is something near and dear to me. I spent a lot of time on SEO. And not all of it has to be super technical, right? You don't always have to be thinking about your sitemaps or robots .TXT files, what have you. As simple as changing the H1s, the headers on your pages can show boost. So what we did, all we did was, when you clicked into a subcategory instead of showing the high-level categories, in this case, it's cameras, when you click DSLR cameras, now it changes to say DSLR cameras, and that was an instant boost. You saw these percent increases on the right there. So, yeah, it doesn't have to be a lot of work, but it can be, these smaller changes can be effective.

And this is just our year over year performance for January. When you do things the right way, it tends to continue to grow. Google will continue to index your content, and it's a slow change. But you should always be thinking about, what could I do next? How could I optimize this? Work with your content producers, work with your IT teams, and it'll show growth, and it's free, right? You don't have to pay for it.

So what did we learn? So something I didn't point out before is that expected decline in traffic. You probably noticed we tanked immediately. So that's tough to sell to leadership, right? It's like, look, we have this great idea. We're going to lose money off the bat. So it's a tough sell, but you have to show the forecast. You have to show the plan. You have to explain why it worked out, or why it will work out, and give yourself at least six months, ideally more, to bounce back. So that really did affect the timing of the migration. We had to adjust our go live data a couple times because you don't want to launch too close to holiday and then ruin the most important time of the year, right? The most wonderful time of the year.

So, and then also you want to have URL strategy up front. A challenge was redirect mapping, right? We had, I think like 15,000 pages. We were consolidating it down to around 3,000 pages. So we had to make sure that all of these important pages had a relevant destination. You can't just redirect what you don't know to the home page. That's going to kill you. So, and the other thing is you can't do the redirect mapping until the pages are merchandised, right? You need the destination URLs. So having that strategy up front of saying, okay, here's the structure of the URLs. This is our naming convention. This is what we can expect it to be. So even if not, everything is quite done, you can start your mapping exercise. And then you also have to think about facets and filters. Are you going to do parameters? Are you just going to do folders like slashes? So just have that set up front, and be prepared to look at your sitemap after you go live and really monitor and change. That's why we had to do so many fixes afterwards because you can't really, you don't know how Google is going to read your site or Bing or whatever is going to read your site before you go live. You could do your best to follow best practices, but you don't know until you know.

And then also consider getting outside help from an agency. We use Merkle. They're pretty good. They're pretty helpful. We also worked with FPT, and they were good partners as well. But, yeah, definitely, it's a lot to do on your own. It was nice having people to ask questions to get that professional opinion while you're also doing a million other things and being that central hub, right? So, now, here's the exciting part, right? Like, did we, did it work? You saw a little bit before it did, but here's the difference. Again, this is 2023 versus 2019 holiday, and we skyrocketed, right? This was our best year. We set records for ourselves. So this felt really good. It was after all that work, all those late nights, all those extra hours, pulling people into meetings, just working close, and everyone in Canon worked hard on this. It was really nice to see this lift. So, obviously, a huge boost in revenue, conversion rates, average order value, and number of transactions, so it was-- As we were watching these graphs day to day and holiday, it was really nice daily stand-up meetings. It was nice to be able to report that up.

So just kind of recapping, right? So we improved our user experience, consistency, performance, mobile friendliness. We modernized our tech stack. We wanted to stay secure. We wanted this great functionality. We wanted to empower the business, so giving people the best way to publish their content, the easiest speed to market. We wanted everyone to be able to do what they needed to do regardless of their web operations experience. And we wanted to improve our traffic, organic traffic, and our SEO rankings. So, yeah, that was the four areas. So what's next? Right? Like I said, you're always improving, you're always making things better. The job's never really over. So one of the first things is that most of or all these stats that I showed you were for Canon USA, but we also work with Canon Canada. We've got a few of them in the crowd. So we're working to get AI product recommendations onto the Canada website. This is using one of the extensions for commerce, so we're excited to have that. We know that it will boost sales. We're launching our Latin America region. We're doing the same type of migration from same backend to Adobe Commerce. So that's a big project right now. We're hoping to have that done by the end of the year. And then we're continuing to leverage Adobe Target, working on our internal structure to make sure that we have everything in place to launch these tests, working with all these different groups, and really narrowing down and understanding our customers better than we ever did before. So these are just some of the next steps. So we're pretty excited about that. Matt, thank you so much for coming and sharing all this. Round of applause for Matt.

I'm going to move through just a few closing slides, and then we can take some questions. I have a few for you. If you think you're going to want to ask a question, you get to stretch your legs and come to the microphone so we can capture it for our recording. So we'll trade places, and then we'll have a little chat after I just finish up these few pieces.

If you've been following Adobe Commerce throughout Adobe Summit, we did release a series of new capabilities and features, many of which, Matt and the team have been exploring and looking at using, investments in our product recommendations engine, and then taking our data that we're capturing on the commerce website and feeding it into Adobe Experience Platform so that if a marketer or merchandiser in Adobe Target wants to create personalized content in Target, they can use the browser events that were happening in commerce or server side data into Adobe Target. So that data connection pillar right in the middle there is all about our integrations from commerce into Target, Adobe Journey Optimizer, real time CDP, and kind of that whole central hub of where all the customer data is. Lots of other innovations live now and coming. I did try to pick out like if I wanted you to go to four places after this, virtually because it's the end of the conference. There's no more sessions after this. These are some things to consider. So Matt's been talking a lot about SEO. So I just put a tag here for the Adobe Commerce SEO Playbook, sort of map some of these concepts that Matt's talking about to how Adobe Commerce supports search engine optimization. The other two, the Adobe Commerce Data Connection demonstration, that's taking the data from commerce and putting it in other Adobe apps, and then the product recommendations guide. If you don't, if you are using our commerce platform or if you'd like to, you can actually find how we use AI to power product recs on the site. And then the last one is one I recommend bookmarking for eternity, because it is a, always updated page of our latest release items. So, every periodically, every several months, we're releasing new capabilities. I recommend just flagging that page. If you're ever trying to keep close to what Adobe Commerce has recently released, that's a page we'll keep updating. Awesome. Thanks so much, Matt. Absolutely. Thanks, everybody. [Music]