13 Pros and cons of Contentsquare
By: Lars Harmsen
Tags: User Experience, Contentsquare, Ab Testing, Google Analytics, Beerwulf

At Beerwulf.com we’ve been working with Contentsquare for over two years. As an avid user of the platform, I often get the question from fellow UX researchers, analysts and optimizers to tell a bit more about the experience we’ve had with them so far as a client.

This post will cover what we at Beerwulf value the most in the platform, and where we think there’s still room for improvement. Note that this post is not sponsored in any way, I’m just trying to help you as a reader make a better evaluation of the platform, since salespeople will only tell you so much, right!?

Pros of using Contentsquare

1. It’s easy to set up

Especially for a (back-then) start-up like Beerwulf, it is not doable to add tracking on all on-site interactions manually from the get-go. Setup and maintenance of the data layer and a tag management tool is a job by itself. With Contentsquare, all you need to do is add one tracking tag on all pages, which then automatically collects every interaction with every element across your website. To track your e-commerce data, you need one additional tag. The best thing is: Contentsquare creates these tags for you, custom-build for your website. Next to these two tags it is optional to enrich the data even further by using additional tags. All tags are stored in a support environment where you can easily communicate with the implementation support team of Contentsquare.

The tags in GTM we use for Contentsquare, of which only 2 are required.

The support environment, where you can easily communicate with the implementation specialist

2. Track all data all the time

Did you ever run an experiment and forgot to track a metric that during analysis would have come in handy? Well, I know I did, especially when I just started out running and analyzing experiments. Contentsquare tracks all interactions all the time, so even if you haven’t ’set a goal’ beforehand you will be able to see the performance of any metric you can think of in retrospect. To date, I haven’t found any tool that can do the same thing without requiring you to manually set up tracking beforehand.

3. Unique metrics

Getting more and/or better insights into the user experience depends on the data you have at your dispense (and how skilled you are at interpreting it, but that’s a different story for a future post). Let’s say you are analyzing a landing page which has a primary goal of selling a specific sale product. Metrics such as the bounce rate and add to cart rate will provide you with an indication on overall performance, and a heatmap and an on-page survey might help you get more insights into how far people scroll and what they are missing on the page. But all these datasources still don’t really tell you how your visitors are behaving and interacting with the page. With some of the (to my knowledge unique) metrics in Contentsquare, you can get more and/or better insights into the experience on that landing page. Amongst other metrics, two of my personal favorites are:

Attractiveness rate, which instead of just showing you the click rate on each element, provides you with the click rate in combination with the exposure rate (meaning that you will be able to see the ‘weighted’ click rate for all elements on the page);

Example for 1000 pageviews: on top of a landing page, exposure rate of a banner is 100% and 50 people click the banner. On the bottom of that page, however, is a newsletter subscription element that is seen by only 250 visitors (exposure rate of 25%) but clicked by 50 people. On click rate, these two elements would both indicate 5%, but on attractiveness rate, the banner shows 5% and the newsletter subscription shows 20%. Might be worthwhile to investigate whether it adds value to put that subscription higher up the page based on that attractiveness rating.

Revenue per click, showing you the revenue each element accounts for, each time that it is clicked. This made decision making so much easier at Beerwulf, because it is pointless to argue endlessly about which product or content block to replace if you know which one drives the least (or most) revenue per click, right?

Click rate on a product detail page, clearly visualized per element

4. Consistent visualization of data

Whether you are a small or big business, everyone in your company has their own preferred way of sharing data and analyses. Pie charts, bar charts, tables, which one do you prefer? Oftentimes you’ll see a broad range of methods within a company, decreasing the processing fluency of analyses you and your colleagues share amongst each other. Tools like PowerBI and Tableau can help you to use a more consistent visualization of data, but the downside is that it takes time to build proper reports that are visually attractive and tell you what you want to know in a glimpse. In Contentsquare, the different analysis modules at your disposal all use a visualization that is optimized for that type of analysis, and although it might require a short explanation the very first time you see a customer journey ’sunburst’, you’ll get the hang of it quickly and it will remain consistent, throughout time and within your organization.

A customer journey ‘sunburst’ for checkout behavior at Beerwulf.com

5. CS Live

CS Live is a Chrome extension that allows you to analyze pages ‘outside of’ the platform, while browsing your website. You can navigate to any page in your website, activate the extension, and see the performance of the page and the accompanying customer behavior with metrics such as number of clicks, conversion rate per click, and exposure time.

When activated, CS Live will put an ‘analysis layer’ over your website, just for you, while browsing

6. AI Alerts

Maybe it’s just me, but the custom alerts in GA have never really worked for me. I want to set alerts for very specific metrics and situations, and I want them to be dynamic: keeping in mind the natural distribution around the average of a metric (regression to the mean). The AI Alerts in Contentsquare allow you to set up an alert on metric, page, or even zone level, which thus allows you to have an alert on basically every interaction with every element on your website. If for instance you want to get an alert when the newsletter subscription box in your checkout is unticked more often than usual, in Germany, for tablet users, you can. And the best thing is that anyone who is using Contentsquare will be able to set it up, for themselves, or to share with others.

AI Alerts allow you to set up alerts for any interaction you can think of

7. The support

It makes a lot of sense to strive for the best support as a platform vendor: the more your client uses the platform, the more it will become a vital part of their day-to-day business, and thus the less likely said client is to churn and look for an alternative. A lot of vendors claim to support you, from onboarding to constantly optimizing your knowledge and usage of their platform, but in the end very few actually do so. You can imagine that I was quite surprised that over the past two years, Contentsquare has supported us in every way possible.

The Contentsquare team for Beerwulf.com consists out of four people:

A customer succes manager , who keeps us informed on all the new features and helps to drive adoption of the platform and a data-driven way of working;

, who keeps us informed on all the new features and helps to drive adoption of the platform and a data-driven way of working; An implementation manager , who helps us to set up additional tracking and tagging, create mappings, and even helps us to figure out the best way to set up our datalayer as a whole;

, who helps us to set up additional tracking and tagging, create mappings, and even helps us to figure out the best way to set up our datalayer as a whole; A data analist , who helps us to better understand the behavior on our website and is even reviewing the analyses we do to help us get better insights;

, who helps us to better understand the behavior on our website and is even reviewing the analyses we do to help us get better insights; A customer enablement manager, who provides workshops and training sessions in our Amsterdam office.

8. The community

One of the best things of being in experimentation and analytics is the community! Everybody is willing to share experiences and learnings, and Contentsquare contributes to that community by organizing regular events such as Client Clubs and Champagne Breakfasts, all over Europe. Meeting fellow analysts working with the Contentsquare platform is of tremendous value to both your personal as well as your organizational development. Learning how others analyze user experience in the broader sense and more specifically with Contentsquare will bring your analytical skills to the next level. So regardless of which tools you use, get out there and meet up with peers to share, learn and get inspired!

9. Contentsquare University

Like with most tools, during the onboarding you’ll get plenty of training and workshops to get to known the tool and maximize the value you can get out of it. However, in addition to these real life training sessions, Contentsquare has created an online learning portal where you can not only improve your skills with the platform but also improve your overall analytical skills. In step by step tutorials they will teach you how to analyze the entire journey or certain pagetypes and segments. These tutorials not only consist out of platform related guidance, but also on an overall way of thinking when analyzing, applicable to analyzing data with any other data analytics tool.

The Contentsquare University, where you can enhance you analytical skills

Cons of using Contentsquare

10. Mappings and their dependencies

As mentioned before, once the tag has been implemented, Contentsquare starts to collect every interaction on your website. To be able to analyze the collected data, you can set up an unlimited amount of ‘mappings’ (basically similar to a GA content grouping). When setting up these mappings, you can go as broad or granular as you like. If you want to split out all product detail pages to compare them amongst each other, you can. If you want to analyze a customer journey based on the overall page categories (eg. category, PDP, cart, checkout), you can. The downside however is that, even though there is a mapping setup assistant, it is not easy to setup and maintain a mapping if your datalayer and your URL structure are not set up properly. For most businesses this will probably not be a big issue because the datalayer often contains a properly defined page category and/or page sub-category, but for a start-up like ours, it definitely required a lot of manual work in setting up mappings that grouped our URLs properly. In addition, goals and some of the segments you create are depending on the mapping you used while setting them up, either directly or indirectly (through a zoning). This means that if you change or delete a mapping, this can have serious implications on all the other parts of the analysis setup (goals, segments, zonings), causing some sort of domino effect.

11. Comparing devices

Even though most of us know we shouldn’t compare amongst devices (since a mobile visitor’s behavior is not really comparable to that of a desktop visitor), we still want to be able to easily compare the performance of the devices, especially when we try to get a better understanding of user behavior from one device compared to the other. In Contentsquare, for 4 of the 7 analysis modules, the only way to compare on a device level is through duplicating your tab, and selecting the device you want to compare with in that duplicated tab. If you spot a difference between the devices (eg. bounce rate on your homepage is higher on mobile than on desktop), you’ll have to manually calculate how big that difference actually is.

12. Long-term data accessibility

In our SLA with Contentsquare, data is stored (or accessible) for three months, meaning that we cannot access the data over three months ago. In general, this is not an issue, except for the fact that we would like to compare year on year performance. I’m not interested in what happened four or five months ago, but I am interested in what happened exactly one year ago, in the same week or on the same day. If you want to access this data your monthly fee will increase, so you’ll have to determine: how much is it worth to you to be able to compare year on year performance? A hard nut to crack.

13. Inability to hide other users content

On most platforms you can choose whether you want to share your content such as segments, customer reports, or goals, with others. In Contentsquare, you cannot. When I want to analyse using my own segments, in my own zonings, I’ll see an endless list of all the content my colleagues have created. Even though I am excited about the fact that they are using the platform so enthusiastically, I would rather just see my own segments to keep a clear overview on what I’m doing. In analyzing data it’s already easy to get lost in tons of reports, so it would be nice to not clutter my already overloaded brain with the creations of others.

Hopefully the above will help you a bit to determine whether Contentsquare is the right tool for you. If not, or in case you have more questions, feel free to leave a comment and get in touch. In addition, make sure to reach out to Contentsquare to set up a demo and ask them anything.

For now, happy analyzing and keep on experimenting!