When your mission is to “empower brands to create better experiences,” it helps to have a website that makes people happy, or at least helps them find what they’re looking for. Unfortunately, for a while, our own digital experience wasn’t keeping up with our own business and product growth. A website redesign was long overdue. 

It’s not a coincidence that we called our re-platforming effort “Project Champagne.” Yes, we’re a French company, so it fits. But also, “Drinking your own champagne” is a saying coined by Pegasystems’ CIO that refers to a company using its own product or services to essentially practice what they preach. 

As Contentsquare emerged as the leader in our industry and a major player in the SaaS space, we needed a website that would directly address four key success criteria:

• Tell the Contentsquare brand story
• Communicate Contentsquare’s industry leadership
• Engage quality leads for potential customers
• Create functionality that allowed for future scalability

In this article, I’m going to outline the approach we took, some of the key decisions that we made along the way, and some early results we’ve seen so far.

The Approach:

One of the first things I did coming into my role at Contentsquare was to pull together a large group of stakeholders to audit the last website and build a project plan. A surefire way to avoid future mistakes and oversights is to learn from past ones. Once we collected all of that feedback, we used it to create a highly detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) that outlined exactly what would determine success for this project. 

We only sent this RFP to select agencies that both had experience building B2B websites in our industry and came with personal recommendations from our professional networks. The agency we selected to partner with was KPS3.

The first thing the KPS3 team did was get to know our product and people, understand the competitive landscape, learn about our current customers, and figure out how the current site was being used. They also asked us at length about the future vision for Contentsquare. This stage of the process broke down into three steps: 

1. To inform the strategy for the Contentsquare website redesign, KPS3 conducted stakeholder interviews with employees across different departments and positions, as well as interviews with customers.
2. We conducted a digital audit, using data from both our product and others like Google Analytics, as well as a deep dive into our CRM data to get a better sense of our buyers.
3. Competitive research was also conducted so we could audit our global competitors’ websites, messaging & positioning, as well as their marketing strategies.

With all that complete the trajectory was clear; we needed to put the voice of the customer on display and let it speak for us. We can say how great we think we are all day, but it carries a lot more impact coming from the 700+ customers who are paying to use our platform. You can see this throughout the new site, starting with the top of our homepage.

We built out the information architecture using what we had learned in discovery. This included the development of the sitemap, content requirements, and initial wireframes. We constantly went back to our top site objectives to keep the site experience focused on helping users achieve their goals while getting some experience with our brand. Taking a user behavioral data-driven approach enabled us to stay true to their needs and battle back the common tendency to keep adding to pages and navigation bars to meet every internal request.  

Once we agreed on the sitemap and wireframes internally, we got into content planning. In my experience, content planning is perhaps the most overlooked part of any website development project. It’s time-consuming and sometimes tedious but saves an untold amount of time down the road when it comes time to start writing and producing content — especially given how much of this content consists of graphics, animation and video today. 

From there we had a few rounds of design, which included direct input from our internal design and UX expert team. Then, our team went to write all the on-page content while the agency worked on developing the component library. What component library, you ask? A perfect segway into our next section…

Key Decisions:

Over the course of any project, there are lots of small decisions made, which, when added up, determine the trajectory of the entire website redesign exercise. In order to make sure we were successful, we needed to be certain our decisions were addressing the four key success criteria we identified at the beginning of the project. Here are some of the key decisions we made to ensure those were addressed:

• Choosing WordPress as our CMS – We needed a somewhat flexible solution that the team was familiar with. Most marketers have used some iteration of WordPress in their careers as it usually strikes the right balance between being flexible and secure. Not to mention free.
• Using a component-based approach to build the site – with WordPress selected, we decided to use a custom implementation of Elementor, a robust page builder plugin. We created the majority of our site pages using customer components our agency build-out for us.
• Localizing and translating the site for each of our key markets – This was a critical one for us. As a French founded company with a strong global presence, we knew we would need the ability to localize our digital content. We use Smartling for most of our bulk translations and a multi-site setup of WordPress so we can easily manage each language site as its own experience.

The Website Redesign Results (So Far):

We are now a few months post-launch of the new site. There are always different success metrics that can be used, but we decided that an analysis of organic traffic would help us best see how the new experience was being used. So far, things are looking very promising. When looking at global organic traffic 45 days after launch, compared to 45 days before the launch, our session duration is up by +12 seconds, demo requests are up +76%, and our bounce rate has plummeted -14% so we now sit just above the 50% mark. 

Secondarily, we are using Contentsquare to continually optimize our website. While the numbers suggest that everything is moving in the right direction, we have already found areas for improvement. Un-clickable areas of the site have a high click recurrence, key features on our navigation bar didn’t get the engagement we hoped for, and unintended customer journey loops need to be smoothed out. We also found exciting ways to personalize content to help visitors progress on their journey and get to know us the way they want to, based on acquisition channel or role. This will be an ongoing iterative process that our marketing team can lead and manage.

We will also continue to mature our operations, connecting our Contentsquare metrics with our Hubspot marketing and downstream Salesforce tracking for deeper analysis of leads and opportunities.

Conclusion:

So looking back at the main objectives we started this website redesign exercise with, did we accomplish what we set out to do? Did we create an experience that is scalable and somewhat future-proof? Check. Did we position our company as an industry leader? Double check. Are we telling the brand story? You betcha. Finally, and most importantly, are we helping quality leads progress through our website? Absolutely.

GoPro has been democratizing the way people capture and share life moments since 2002. As social media continues to turn everyone and their mother into a content creator, the brand has been making professional quality photography available to everyone with a video story to tell.

GoPro has gotten its camera in skateparks and oceans, on trails and slopes the world over, and to a large extent, its brand-building activities have organically been taken over by its active and energetic community of fans.

This community of thrill-seekers and storytellers is responsible for the tight link between GoPro’s product and the action-packed content and raw footage that has become synonymous with the brand. A lot of this content lives on the GoPro platform and is a key part of the GoPro.com visitor experience.

GoPro, Its UX and Direct-to-Consumer Sales Goals

A lifestyle-dedicated supplier of action cameras since 2002, GoPro isn’t just selling a camera — it’s promoting the ability to create lasting visual memories of your life adventures. As such, the site is much more than just a showcase of the product — it has to communicate the possibilities of the brand.

This is not to say that consumers merely head to the GoPro site to immerse themselves in the brand universe; they also make purchases and purchase decisions that may see them converting on partner vendor sites. As such, eCommerce conversions are a must for the brand.

Aside from the additional selling opportunities other marketplaces offer, they also bring forth the additional challenge of engaging customers and influencing their purchase decisions to favor the brand above its competitors.

For GoPro, onsite sales represent larger margins, of course, but more importantly, they afford the brand greater control of the customer experience within the GoPro.com ecosystem, and a richer opportunity to connect with its community of users.

For this reason, the brand has been actively focused on increasing its direct-to-consumer sales, while at the same time providing a meaningful experience to consumers who may go on to convert elsewhere.

The GoPro Hero7 is the seller’s flagship item and the brand was hoping it can boost eCommerce conversions.

Laying Out an Impactful Content Plan

To achieve the broad objective of increasing direct-to-customer sales, the brand began by focusing on its most heavily trafficked page (and primary revenue stream): the Hero7 camera product detail page.

The previous iteration of the page had been fairly simple, and the team felt it lacked the visual wow factor the brand has come to be known for. The team was keen to try out a new, media-rich version of the page that would give prospective customers a first-person view of the camera’s capabilities.

The challenge was: how to go bold with the content while keeping the customer journey friction free? How to know what content was encouraging engagement and conversions? And more to the point… how much content is too much content?

Gaining Visible Insights into the Customer Journey & Page Elements

To understand the content ROI of the Hero7 camera product page, the brand first dived into a broader depiction of analytics, that of the customer journey, to see how the visitors were arriving at the page.

After analyzing user paths, the client looked at the in-page behavior of the product page using Contentsquare’s zone-based heatmaps. Through this feature, the brand studied individual page elements to determine what exactly gave rise to conversions, hesitations and bounces.

Looking at unique metrics such as engagement rate and attractiveness rate as well as click rate, the team was able to understand how visitors consumed the content, which elements triggered interactions and which were UX dead-ends.

UX Implementations & Their Outcomes

Based on the data that our sunburst and behavioral metrics provided, GoPro confidently redesigned the product page by way of bulking it up with more content. This spurred a more customer-centric experience for the site visitors in that it focused on their unique consumer journeys and their personal interactions with distinct site elements.

Since videos received a lot of clicks and views, there was clearly a hunger for this kind of content and the client decided to capitalize on that.  

The redesign provided a unique customer experience that allured and engaged a stronger community of customers. This resulted in a whopping 80% increase in conversions. The mission of upping direct-to-customer sales was decidedly accomplished.

Unique metrics from Contentsquare overlaid on GoPro’s page elements helped foster UX decision-making.

Casting Unique Experiences for Unique Brands

The GoPro case shows that behavioral analytics don’t only serve as evidential data to use for making basic UX decisions. While we highlight that data keeps you aware of the goings on of your website and helps streamline the path to conversions, it can hold even more power.

As the GoPro case has proved, content holds a major position in the customer decision journey and in the UX space at large. It can act as the deciding factor behind a user’s ultimate hesitation — that of leaving, or that of converting.

For GoPro, content is paramount, as the content is intertwined with the product itself, and is a vehicle for articulating the brand’s uniqueness.

Whether or not your end goal and overall branding is content-heavy, you should always consult with behavioral data to see how your website is accessed and used. Data adds a safety net to your innovation strategy, and helps you better align your creative content with the needs and preferences of your customers and brand ambassadors.