After raising $120 million since 2017, and following the acquisitions of Clicktale and Pricing Assistant, digital experience analytics leader Contentsquare announced record results for the full year 2019. For its vision and accomplishments, the company has been named a 2020 BIG Innovation Award winner by the Business Intelligence Group.

“The digital experience analytics industry is growing at a rapid pace and Contentsquare is leading the way. Our company had tremendous growth this year including revenue, clients, geographic reach, employees, partnerships and product,” said Contentsquare CEO, Jonathan Cherki. “Customer feedback makes it clear we have the right strategy executed by the right people so we look forward to a bright 2020.”

Record Company Growth

With a mission to empower brands to create better web, mobile, and app experiences, Contentsquare grew annual recurring revenue nearly 200% during 2019. New and expanded clients include industry leaders across sectors such as BCG, Best Buy, Caixa Bank, Crocs, Deichmann, Dell, Europcar, Eurostar, Ferragamo, Orvis, Pizza Hut, RBS, T-Mobile, TomTom, Toyota, Tumi, Unilever, and many others. Contentsquare analyzes more than 9 trillion consumer interactions each day to provide its more than 600 enterprise clients worldwide with benchmarks and recommendations.

Companies worldwide are turning to Contentsquare for a new breed of analytics which surfaces digital behavior insights essential for improving customer journeys, increasing mobile conversions and increasing revenue. In 2019, more than 200 new customers joined the Contentsquare community and total usage of the platform increased nearly 300%. Contentsquare’s international sales grew at a brisk pace in 2019, with 40% of its business now in the United States and 50% in Europe, including strong adoption across France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Nordics. The company is growing faster than expected in Asia, particularly in Japan; Contentsquare is investing across the region in Australia, Singapore and China.

Contentsquare doubled its staff in the last year, growing the team from 300 to 600. The company plans to fill 200 positions this year. Contentsquare has 7 offices in Paris, Munich, London, New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Tokyo. In line with its mission to create better experiences, the company continued to invest in its employee culture, adding new benefits and bringing all employees together for the annual offsite.

Ecosystem Integrations and Strategic Partnerships

Building a strong partner community is a key ingredient of Contentsquare’s strategy. The company’s partner program invites both services and technology partners to leverage the Contentsquare technology in order to create value for their customers. The company has built technology integrations with more than 100 software vendors, including some of the key players in its ecosystem such as Google, Adobe, Oracle, Medallia, Qualtrics, Tealium, Dynamic Yield, Usabilla, Monetate, Kameleoon, Qubit, ForeSee and OpinionLab. Contentsquare also announced in 2019 a business and technology integration with Salesforce. These seamless ecosystem integrations allow clients to leverage the power of Contentsquare data and insights to enhance the value of their commerce and marketing solutions. The company has also developed strategic partnerships with consultants and digital marketing solutions providers around the world, including WPP, Capgemini, Havas, Accenture, BCG, Wunderman, Dentsu Merkle and many others across Europe, the United States, LATAM, the Middle East and Asia. See them here.

Innovation with Artificial Intelligence, Privacy and Security Focus

To keep up with the needs of its clients, the company is constantly innovating and adding new modules to the platform. With 170 people in R&D and Product, Contentsquare is built to provide instant insights that go beyond what traditional “clickstream” analytics can show. A major new version of the platform debuted in 2019, integrating capabilities from its acquisitions such as Session Replay and featuring innovations such as Revenue Opportunities which estimates the financial impact of recommended modifications. The company also introduced the industry’s first turnkey holistic online experience score, the Digital Happiness Index.

When it comes to data privacy and security, Contentsquare continues to put its clients and their end users first, obtaining ISO 27001 certification with SOC 2 compliance completing in 2020. The company is also fully compliant with applicable data privacy laws such as EU GDPR and California CCPA.

In addition to the 2020 BIG Innovation Award, Contentsquare was named as a Next40 growth company by the French government and recognized by Global research firm Gartner, as a leader in the Customer Experience Digital Analytics field. Contentsquare CEO, Jonathan Cherki is participating in this year’s Davos World Economic Forum.

“Our ambition remains unchanged: empower brands to deliver better digital experiences. We are creating an intelligent brain inside the cloud that, thanks to our amazing clients, is improving the digital products and services that we all depend on every day. Our team constantly goes beyond traditional limits to achieve this vision. The results obtained over the last 12 months just strengthen our ambition to put the power of Contentsquare in the hands of every digital professional,” said Cherki.

Halloween is creeping in on us as the October days tail off. But that doesn’t mean your user experience (UX) should be frightening. While frights are fun for haunted houses and other ghoulish festivities, they shouldn’t trickle into your customer experience. 

Alas, as our clients can attest, bad UX has reared its head like a zombie rearing out of a tomb many a time.

Scary. We know. That’s why we’ve compiled a horrifying list of poor UX design examples and ghastly digital experiences, right before Halloween, so you don’t scare off your potential customers. 

Even your most loyal customers will be put off by a bad digital experience. Sometimes, this bad UX arises out of something seemingly minor — a missing image, unclear text, an element located a little further down the fold… That’s what makes bad design particularly scary, in that what seems trivial and inconsequential gives rise to dire consequences.

But fear not! Our 5 scary examples of poor user experiences include very specific cases of how simple elements can go awry. Let’s see what scariness our clients underwent. (SPOILER ALERT: although these real-life UX horror stories seem grim, they all have a happy, data-driven ending). 

Unclear Filters Dampening Sales 

Clicks are great, right? So naturally, a hearty dosage of clicks should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? At face value, it may seem so, as when a zone or an element on a webpage receives a lot of clicks, it signifies ample interaction.

But as our client learned the hard way, click activity, or the study thereof, is not enough when UX is concerned. Studying clicks is crucial, don’t get us wrong. But it offers only a faint glimpse of the overall portrait of your UX.

Our client, a purveyor of men’s fashions, had recently developed a new mega menu. So when it recorded high click activity on the menu, this appeared to be nothing but positive. But it was bearing something sinister; the client noticed a major discrepancy on their site regarding attitudes towards clicks: when clicks increased, sales slumped. 

How was this possible? A UX analysis of in-page behavior presented some incongruity between the mega menu and search/category filters. While menu interactions were high, filter usage was stagnant. With unused filters, shoppers weren’t seeing all the products relevant to them, so sales took a tumble. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

Frightening Sliders Causing High Homepage Bounce Rate

Every mega menu — filled with panels, categories and text — ought to be complemented by visual elements. It would thereby seem natural to include sliders to accompany a mega menu, especially on the homepage, where such elements typically exist.

In the case of our beauty client, this placement wound up being a design fright, much to the detriment of their customers’ user experience, as the customers bounced.

Featuring a wealth of merchandise pushes, the homepage is the gateway to pique product awareness and interest for our client. But it was beset with high bounce rates. With a seemingly healthy swath of products on the homepage, the client was bewildered by what the UX culprit could be.

When analyzing the homepage, with special attention to the mega menu and sliders, the client found that the sliders were generating little to no engagement. Instead, these sliders overwhelmed the mega menu, leading many to bounce before engaging with either of these elements. Spooky.

Confusing Label on the Store Locator Causing Fewer Web-to-Store Visits

A store locator is a handy UI feature for click-and-mortar brands, especially those seeking to uplift web-to-store visits. After all, netizens won’t visit a physical store if they don’t know where it is. 

Instead of looking to Google, visitors ought to trust your brand enough to know that any useful location info exists on your own website. So when our client, a luxury click-and-mortar brand discovered high exits on their store locator, they were beside themselves.

Through granular analytics, they learned that for many site users, the store locator was the main reason behind their visit. Its button, however, had a ghastly label, one with even ghastlier results. It read “product search,” which befuddled users.

To the client, it appeared to be a nifty feature, an add-on to a traditional locator functionality. But it produced high hovers and low clicks, turning users away from the store locator, and as such, from completing their objective of a store visit. This worsened sales for items only available in-store. Creepers.

Disappearing Checkouts Angering Customers and Reducing Revenue

Conversions. Every brand wants them, but few products or even brands at large can trigger them. As such, users who reach the checkout — the final phase of both the customer journey and the sales funnel — signify a UX victory in itself.

Unfortunately, our retail apparel client was racked by bad UX on this holy grail of pages. Our VoC integration had gotten word of users’ ghostly experience when they reached the client’s checkout page.  In fact, a whopping 1,500 customers were afflicted by the ghostly checkout, leading them to complain via the call center, and as our UX analysis showed, leave the site.

When we say ghostly, we mean it. Behavioral analysis caught wind of the sudden onslaught of blank screens when users reached the checkout page. This, in turn, led users on the cusp of converting to abandon the checkout and the site, which reduced revenue for the clients. Yikes!

Simple Missing Image Impairing Conversion Rates

The above examples elucidated how site content led to a bad UX, with scary repercussions ensuing from each such case. But sometimes it’s the missing content that creates scary UX chaos.

In the case of our hospitality client, a missing image made all the difference for the conversion rates on their property pages. 

During a granular UX analysis, the client discovered high click rates on the links to property pages, i.e., pages with hotel offerings. The problem was, despite the clear interest in these hotel pages, users would abandon the site after landing on them.

This caused conversion rates to plummet and an addled brand, as it was unsure of the culprit behind the bad UX, since the images were crystal clear and the deals were showing.

A deeper UX analysis — one on journey analysis, revealed a major gap in the UX of these product pages. Visitors were looking for rooms that included a complimentary breakfast, commonplace in European hospitality, but were struggling to find this information. A simple image notifying free breakfast, even an icon of food would have prevented the loss of this conversion stream. The horror!

UX Analytics: The Bad UX Buster

Any brand can fall prey to scary bad UX. But bad UX need not uphold its reign of terror on your website; there is a solution.

This mighty antidote is granular user experience analytics, the kind of data that can back up the hidden trappings of customer frustration and its digital origins. Whether on its own or paired with VoC, granular data gives you indispensable knowledge on your UX.

The metrics and other capabilities (heatmaps with metric overlays, customer journey analysis) of these analytics do not merely point out the scary monsters causing a bad UX. They also deduce the changes and additions your website needs to rectify the issues caused by the poor UX and improve your sales figures. 

In short, a unique set of UX analytics combat these UX monsters so they can never rear their ugly heads again. Not even on Halloween.