From first click to long-term loyalty: introducing the User Lifecycle Extension for Experience Analytics

The customer journey doesn’t end at conversion—but it doesn’t start on your site either. 

Digital teams need to understand not just how users arrive on their site, but how they behave across sessions, what makes them return, and which experiences drive loyalty. That's why Contentsquare is expanding its Experience Analytics offering with a powerful new product: the User Lifecycle Extension. 

It provides acquisition insights and user lifetime metrics in one platform, helping your teams improve retention and gain more high-value customers faster.

Why now? Because the customer journey is evolving

It’s tempting to focus just on bringing in new customers—but acquisition alone won’t drive sustainable growth anymore.

Today, it’s getting more expensive to win each new user. According to the 2025 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, costs are rising and margins are tighter:

• Digital ad spend has increased by 13.2% in just 2 years

• The cost of a single visit is up 9%

• Paid traffic still only converts at 1.83%

In this environment, retention is your real advantage. 

Returning customers don’t just buy more often, they spend more time engaging with your site. They view 19% more pages per visit, spend an extra minute on site, and convert at a rate that's 62% higher than new visitors. And the brands winning today are the ones that understand why users come back—and build on it, growing profitable, lasting relationships.

What the User Lifecycle Extension unlocks

We’re bringing true user-centricity and multi-session understanding to Experience Analytics. The Contentsquare User Lifecycle Extension lets you expand your view on the user experience (UX), from what attracts customers to why they come back.

With 4 product and marketing analytics functionalities, this enhancement connects acquisition and retention, offering your team insights into customer behavior across sessions and helping you optimize for customer lifetime value (LTV). Let’s take a look at these.

1. Acquisition analysis: see what drives long-term engagement

The User Lifecycle Extension builds on Experience Analytics’ powerful capabilities—like Journey Analysis and Session Replay—so you can see which traffic sources actually drive high-quality, high-retention users. 

With the Acquisition analysis functionality, you can

• Spot which traffic sources bring in users who come back, not just bounce or convert right away

• Find out which marketing campaigns attract people who explore, engage, and keep returning

• Combine customer journey data with lifetime value and return frequency to understand what drives lasting engagement

• Optimize your advertising spend by focusing on sources that deliver consistent impact over time

Instead of optimizing for a single moment, you’re scaling what actually works—inside the same workflow your team already uses.

📊 For example: identify a campaign that doesn’t win on day-one conversions, but brings back 3x more returning users. Now you can invest in loyalty, not just clicks.

Acquisition analysis shows you which sources drive your most valuable users, not just your highest click rates

2. Lifetime metrics: track content and page performance over time

It’s easy to track how a page performs on a single visit, but what about its impact over multiple sessions? The User Lifecycle Extension enhances Experience Analytics tools by adding a long-term view of user behavior with metrics like average lifetime revenue and multi-session purchase rate. 

This is especially useful for teams rolling out UX changes or testing new features, helping them track content and page performance across visits to reveal deeper insights:

• Page Comparator: see which pages not only drive immediate conversions but also keep users coming back. This helps you identify the content that delivers lasting value, beyond the first visit.

• Zone-Based Heatmaps: go beyond single-session data to track which areas of a page keep users engaged over time. This helps you spot the elements that encourage repeat visits and ongoing interaction.

• Journey Analysis: get deeper insights into the full user journey. With the extension, you can track how users move across sessions, pinpointing the experiences that bring them back or push them away.

📊 For example: you find a product page that doesn’t just convert but attracts users back again and again before purchase and understand why. That's long-term value you can build on.

Use Journey Analysis to understand which paths have a healthy exit, bringing your visitors back

3. Lifetime value segments: group and target users by return habits

With pre-built segments based on lifetime behavior, you can dive deeper into multi-session actions and make smarter, faster decisions. Whether you're optimizing marketing automation or refining your strategy, you can

• Build audience segments around return behavior (like users who come back more times before purchasing)

• Track journeys across devices and understand what behaviors lead to conversion

• Fine-tune your onsite messaging, personalization, and remarketing to match what users actually want

📊 For example: you discover that users who return to your site more than once are 50% more likely to convert. You can now personalize content and messaging for them for better results.

Analyze user sessions by segmenting them based on your customers’ lifetime behavior 

4. User views: gain complete user visibility across sessions

Get unprecedented insights into how individual users engage with your brand across multiple sessions, helping you understand the full story behind conversions or drop-offs. Here's how you can dig deeper:

• View specific users and all of their sessions in a single, easy-to-read timeline

• Spot behavior patterns that lead to conversions or abandonment

• Pinpoint user friction across sessions with AI-generated session replay summaries 

• Quickly pinpoint what happened before and after key actions like sign-ups, add-to-cart, or drop-offs

📊 For example: a user adds a product to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase. Reviewing their sessions reveals confusion around shipping costs. By fixing this, you can improve your conversion rates.

Instantly spot and analyze your highest-value users, their journeys, and where you can make the biggest impact

Who the User Lifecycle Extension helps

Contentesquare’s Experience Analytics tools turn every user interaction into a clear next move, showing teams exactly where to act. 

The User Lifecycle Extension builds on that clarity, helping teams move past surface-level metrics and drive smarter growth across the entire journey.

What makes this different from other tools

Plenty of platforms talk about retention and lifecycle. But few combine the power of session replays, customer journey analysis, page insights, and acquisition analysis in one seamless, connected experience.

With the User Lifecycle Extension, there’s

• No complex setup: seamless integration with your existing Experience Analytics account

• No need for a full analytics team: get actionable insights without additional resources

• Immediate value: start seeing the impact right away

Built for speed and scale, it’s designed for teams that need answers fast—not just more dashboards.

Make your data work smarter

Traditional funnel analysis is great for showing how users move through a site in one session. But that’s not how most users behave anymore.

People visit on mobile, then come back on desktop. They browse one day, compare options the next, and maybe convert a week later. That’s especially true for businesses with

• High reliance on paid traffic

• Long sales cycles (e.g., B2B SaaS, finance, travel)

• Self-serve options or account portals

To make better decisions, you need a full view of the customer journey, not just isolated snapshots. Your team needs to be able to correlate every touchpoint, from first visit to long-term loyalty.

Traditional funnel analytics can’t connect the dots. The User Lifecycle Extension can.

FAQs about the User Lifecycle Extension