How Canyon Bicycles reduced data analysis time by 94% with Contentsquare’s AI

Key insights

The company

Canyon Bicycles GmbH is the world's largest direct-to-consumer (D2C) performance bicycle company. Headquartered in Koblenz, Germany, Canyon sells exclusively online—with no third-party retail—making its digital experience the primary customer touchpoint across more than 80 markets in 17 languages.

Performance, optimization, and innovation are core to Canyon's DNA. That same engineering mindset shapes how the brand approaches its digital experience. 

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann, Global Director of Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations, leads the teams at the center of that effort, including Canyon's Digital Growth and Merchandising Managers (DGMMs), category-level conversion rate optimization specialists responsible for commercial performance across bike types and gear ranges.

The challenge

For a brand built on the principle of marginal gains—the idea that small, compounding improvements drive the biggest overall performance—Canyon's digital team found themselves working with data that only told half the story.

Relying on Google Analytics and BI dashboards, they could see what customers were doing. But not why. And without understanding the ‘why,’ optimizing the customer journey at scale was an uphill climb. Key pain points included:

• Lack of behavioral depth: quantitative data alone couldn't explain friction in the purchase journey or uncover what drove—or killed—conversion

• Low data accessibility: tools like Google Analytics were hard to navigate for occasional users, limiting who could confidently act on data day to day

• No scalable CRO framework: the team had no structured, repeatable way to connect journey optimization to measurable business impact

• No dedicated A/B testing tool: running on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Canyon had no integrated experimentation platform, making CRO harder to execute and validate

The DGMM team was doing excellent work—but it was largely reactive, focused on short-term conversion targets. Canyon needed them to think bigger: bridging behavioral insights with long-term commercial outcomes.

The solution

In mid-2025, Canyon implemented Contentsquare, starting with its two largest markets as a proof of concept. The goal: give the team the insight depth, accessibility, and scalable impact framework that existing tools couldn't provide.

"How do we translate behavioral insights into commercial outcomes? What is the bridge between the two? That's where we came up with Contentsquare," said Sarah Wilson-Reissmann. "This was really the missing piece."

How Contentsquare helped Canyon

1. Making data accessible to every team member

Canyon's analytics function is lean by design. That means non-analysts—UX designers, DGMMs, product owners—need to be able to make data-driven decisions on their own, without waiting for a dedicated analyst to run a report.

Contentsquare's CSQ Live Chrome extension became a key enabler of that independence. By embedding directly into the browser, it allows anyone to run Zoning Analysis on live pages without ever logging into the full platform. One of Canyon's UX designers conducts all of his zoning work this way—surfacing behavioral data exactly where and when he needs it.

Sense, Contentsquare's built-in AI, further reduced the time and expertise required to gain insights. What might previously have taken four to six hours of analysis can now be done in as little as 20 minutes.

Sense Analyst, Contentsquare’s AI agent 

Being able to use either Sense Chat or Sense Analyst has really democratized the tool for people so that they can come in and still get the insights that they're needing without spending a ton of time or having to relearn the tool every time.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann

Global Director Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations

2. Optimizing upper-funnel pages with behavioral and SEO analysis

Canyon's ‘World’ and ‘Ride Style’ pages are high-traffic upper-funnel pages, attracting significant organic search visitors. The team redesigned these pages to be more ecommerce-directed—replacing a large image slider with a compact on-page navigation to improve mobile experience and SEO performance.

The result: a +13 average ranking increase for Road pages. But the story didn't end there. Rankings improved, yet ecommerce performance didn't follow as expected. That's where Contentsquare's Zoning Analysis and traffic segmentation came in.

We used Contentsquare to really dive in and understand what was going on with organic search traffic—how those users' behavior differed from people who were coming directly, from email or other channels. We were also comparing differences in organic search traffic between desktop and mobile.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann

Global Director Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations

By layering behavioral data on top of channel and device segments, the team could pinpoint where organic visitors were dropping off and what they were engaging with—turning a puzzling result into a roadmap for further optimization.

3. Enhancing A/B testing without a dedicated testing tool

Without an integrated experimentation platform, Canyon's A/B testing was limited in both speed and depth. Contentsquare stepped in to fill the gap. 

The team created custom segments within the platform to represent control and variant groups—enabling behavioral analysis to begin before statistical significance is reached using data from Google Analytics.

When testing whether a video or a still image performed better in the homepage's second position—a decision with real production cost implications—Zoning Analysis provided visual behavioral evidence of how users in each group were engaging. That supplemented standard GA metrics with a richer, more actionable layer of insight.

We've set up segments in Contentsquare for the control and variant groups, and we can already start to see the behavioral analysis as they're moving through. When we provide our final report with GA metrics, we can also supplement with some really nice screenshots of zoning and what people are doing differently in the different groups.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann

Global Director Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations

4. Connecting journey optimization to commercial performance

The biggest shift Contentsquare enabled at Canyon isn't a single use case—it's a structural one. The DGMM team, previously focused on short-term conversion targets, is now equipped to think in longer time horizons: using behavioral insight to inform category-level strategy and connect the customer journey to commercial outcomes.

That shift is sustained through the internal adoption practices Canyon deliberately built. Monthly ‘Contentsquare share’ sessions bring together all 29 active users from across departments. Power users present recent analyses, the actions taken, and the business impact. Contentsquare's customer success manager joins most months to answer questions and share updates on new capabilities.

Contentsquare really connects journey optimization with commercial performance. Our DGMM team is a perfect example of how we're bringing that together.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann

Global Director Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations

The results

Within nine months of going live, Canyon achieved meaningful results across SEO performance, analysis efficiency, and organization-wide adoption:

• +13 average ranking increase for Road pages, following behavioral-informed page redesigns

• Analysis time reduced from 4–6 hours to ~20 minutes with Sense—for both power users and occasional users

• 29 active users across multiple departments, from ecommerce and UX to product and marketing

• A UX designer running all zoning analysis directly on the live site via CSQ Live—without ever logging into the full Contentsquare interface

What's next

Canyon's ambitions with Contentsquare are accelerating. In 2026 and beyond, the team has four major initiatives on the horizon:

1. Expanding Contentsquare coverage to additional markets, increasing data volume and aggregate reliability

2. Scaling Sense Analyst to speed up analysis, sharpen recommendations, and power cross-team reporting

3. Onboarding Product Analytics to track cross-session behavior and understand the full customer lifecycle—critical context when a single bicycle purchase can take weeks of research and multiple site visits before converting

4. Informing the ongoing website redesign with behavioral data from Contentsquare, ensuring every design decision is grounded in how real customers move through the site

Hopefully we'll be back—after eight years of working with the product—to show some pretty amazing innovations and things that we have done thanks to Contentsquare.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann

Global Director Digital Merchandising & Ecommerce Operations