Audi boosts conversions by +7% through data-driven CRO with Contentsquare

Key metrics

The company

Audi, part of the Volkswagen Group, is a global luxury carmaker known for championing ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’, which translates to progress through technology.

For over 50 years and across 100+ markets, the brand has brought innovation to customers at every touchpoint. Jonny Evans, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Manager at Audi UK, says they “aim to match the DNA of our digital experiences to the DNA of our luxury and premium vehicles.”

Jonny leads website experimentation and analytics to ensure the online journey meets the high expectations of Audi customers.

The challenge

Audi’s website offered extensive product information, but the team lacked clarity on which content was valuable for customers and driving impactful outcomes. The team couldn’t tell which elements moved users forward or frustrated them. Traditional analytics provided little insight into what actually drove inquiries, which remain the key action for online car buyers. 

Without that clarity, the experience became hard to improve and even harder to personalize.

So when Audi rolled out its CRO program, as part of a broader initiative under the Volkswagen Group, they decided to lean on Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform. This marked a shift from guesswork to evidence-based action. Contentsquare became a strategic tool, powering deep user insight, streamlining journeys, and boosting conversion rates.

What makes Contentsquare different from other analytics tools is the visualization mixed with data customization. You don't necessarily have to be a data scientist to get what you want from the platform. Other analytics platforms need you to actively tag something first, whereas Contentsquare captures everything, so you just have to segment and filter.

Jonny Evans

Conversion Rate Optimization Manager

The solution

Jonny and his team integrated Contentsquare with their other experimentation and analytics tools, ensuring everyone looked at the same data, spoke the same language, and worked toward the same outcomes.

They defined specific user actions, such as clicks, form submissions, and error states, as custom goals to track meaningful behavior.

We send our custom goals through Contentsquare. That means it can answer almost any question you want to throw at it, from the very macro stuff like how users navigate our website down to the very finite detail of what might be hindering us in a form.

Jonny Evans

CRO Manager

With that foundation in place and website optimization support from its digital agency, Audi unlocked 3 critical use cases that continue to shape its digital strategy today:

1. Determining and driving attention to high-value content 

Audi manages about 80 product pages, covering each model and body style. Following common practices in the automotive industry, these pages are content-heavy. They displayed every detail upfront, without considering actual users’ needs. 

Jonny’s team used Contentsquare’s Heatmaps capability to uncover exact friction points across these product pages. By focusing on a zone metric called the attractiveness rate, they saw which parts were driving engagement and conversions and which ones were causing confusion and drop-offs. 

This deep dive allowed them to rationalize their content and confidently pinpoint which parts to keep, remove, or repurpose elsewhere on the site.

A/B testing then validated their decision to simplify product pages. It showed that converting users enjoyed the cleaner, more intuitive experience, preferring to navigate naturally to what they needed rather than sifting through a wall of content.

2. Spotting and fixing issues fast before they can harm conversions 

Sometimes, barriers to conversion are technical. Thanks to Contentsquare’s Error Analysis capability, Jonny’s team can set up alerts to technical (and non-technical) error spikes in real time and identify those linked to user frustration. 

Technical errors related to JavaScript or API are examples, while frustration signals include rage clicks and repeated attempts to complete a form field. 

This proactive approach benefits the development team, too. Once alerted, they can jump directly to Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability to watch how users experience a bug or problem. They no longer have to rely on secondhand explanations or reproduce the issue from scratch.

When it’s just numbers on a screen, it can be really hard to digest the information. You can feel like the one processing stuff and having to manually get from point A to point B, and that can take a long time. In contrast, because Contentsquare insights are visual, we can spend less time analyzing and more time thinking about what we can do about certain issues.

Jonny Evans

CRO Manager

3. Collaborating with Accenture to leverage integrations 

CRO isn’t complete without experimentation. With Contentsquare seamlessly integrated into Audi’s experimentation stack, Jonny’s team can dig beneath the surface of test results to understand why some variants worked and others didn’t.

Additionally, Accenture is helping Audi drive data-backed digital experiences. Jonny’s team maximizes Contentsquare’s integration with analytics and A/B testing systems, and Accenture supports this by planning experiment ideas, analyzing previous experiments, and delving deeper into results to validate conclusions.

For example, when a test fails for unknown reasons, they’ll delve into Contentsquare’s visual data, captured in session replays or heatmaps, to uncover the root cause. 

Caontentsquare lets you see a list of session replays containing errors, ranked by their impact on conversion

The results

Through Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics insights, Jonny’s team simplified their product pages and guided users toward more profitable paths. In numbers, these performance gains translate to a

• +7% lift in conversion rate to lead (inquiry)

• -8% decrease in bounce rate

• +7% increase in time on site

Since we established CRO and integrated Contentsquare, we've seen year-on-year improvements in our on-site conversion rate to inquiry, and that's in a time where users have been less likely to give up their data. So we're bucking the trend there in terms of raw numbers.

Jonny Evans

CRO Manager

Beyond the numbers, Contentsquare’s intuitive point-and-click interface has made analysis faster and easier. Instant visibility into user issues has reduced the back-and-forth for the developers. 

Last but not least, Audi’s CRO evolution, powered by Contentsquare, underscores the luxury car brand’s leap to more data-driven decisions. Without it, Jonny says they’d probably still be working in the same way—not necessarily questioning what they were doing or trying to optimize.

Without Contentsquare, we’d probably still be putting content on-site that we thought was good, without really knowing its impact or what we were optimizing for. I think now, in recent years, we’ve been led way more by insight and therefore acting on knowledge, not just assumptions.

Jonny Evans

CRO Manager

What’s next?

Knowing and acting from a position of strength is a good look for Audi. Therefore, Jonny’s team is doubling down on their Contentsquare investment. 

Having recently added Contentsquare’s Voice-of-Customer (VoC) product to their workflow, they’re looking to integrate the platform’s Product Analytics product next. This aligns with their ongoing goal to expand 360-degree visibility in their analytics and deepen customization.

Meanwhile, plans to implement Contentsquare’s metrics API feature will enable them to build not just internal dashboards but also feed data to the site, showing valuable information to customers. That is, they’re weighing the idea of displaying social proof on-site to nudge users to convert.

“I think Contentsquare has shown in the last few years that it’s an incredibly impressive platform,” shares Jonny. “So if we stay pretty close to Contentsquare, then I think we'll only get stronger.”