How Smyths Toys relies on Conductor Website Monitoring monitoring to prevent eCommerce disasters

Smyths Toys Superstores is a multinational chain provider of children's toys and entertainment products with over 200 shops throughout Ireland, the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Smyths Toys' achievements:

Monitoring of large-scale content automation
Ranking, traffic and revenue disasters averted
Time spent on SEO auditing reduced by 50%

Smyths Toys Superstores (opens in a new tab) is an Irish multinational chain provider of children's toys and entertainment products with over 200 shops throughout Ireland, the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

The company is headquartered in Galway, Ireland, and employs thousands of employees throughout its operations.

The challenge

With an online catalog of over 8,000 products, the web team relies on a high degree of automation. With a constant supply of new product and replacements coming in, the website is highly dynamic.

One example of automation is automatic redirects placed when products go out of stock. The redirects are automatically pointed to the product's category listing page, but oftentimes there are better suited content alternatives to redirect to.

Roman Sadowski, Senior SEO specialist at Smyths Toys, realized it was practically impossible to keep track of these continuous changes with traditional crawling software, and went looking for a solution.

The solution

Sadowski came across Conductor Website Monitoring, and immediately started tracking redirects and other content automation with its 24/7 Monitoring™ and Change Tracking™ technology.

By continuously having eyes on product redirects, we can immediately step in and amend the default redirect, replacing it with a more relevant or replacement product.

On top of the on-going monitoring of the product catalog and content automation, Conductor Website Monitoring also caught a major website release disaster:

Our SAP team deployed a change which inadvertently swapped around the URL structure, essentially redirecting the entire website! For users there wasn't any real difference, but Google started dropping our rankings almost immediately.

Thanks to Conductor Website Monitoring we spotted the problem right away. Without Conductor Website Monitoring, it could have taken days or even weeks before we would have figured out why rankings dropped.

The results

The impact Conductor Website Monitoring has been significant to Smyths Toys' digital performance:

We are seeing a real difference in rankings, get more relevant traffic and generate more sales.

Not only did this lead to a significant revenue loss prevention, Conductor Website Monitoring's real-time auditing engine directly contributed to Smyths Toys growth:

We were #14 out of 250 UK brands with the fastest growing SEO in 2020 according to research done by Re:signal. I attribute part of this growth directly to Conductor Website Monitoring.

Industry developments

eCommerce will dominate the retail industry for decades to come. Consumers care less and less where they shop, as long as they get the right price and almost immediate delivery.

This shift puts pressure on web and SEO teams, who –at the scale they operate– have no choice but to rely on content automation to satisfy these demands.

Conductor Website Monitoring rises to the challenge, by putting the SEO auditing process on autopilot for top-performers like Smyths Toys.

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