Michael Hill made data everyone's business—and increased average transaction value by +64%

The company

Michael Hill is a specialty retailer of jewellery in Australasia. With nearly 300 stores across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the brand offers everything from everyday jewelry to high-value engagement rings and diamond pieces. 

As digital commerce becomes a bigger growth driver, Aaron Duxfield, Head of Ecommerce, and his team needs to ensure that the online experience matches the trusted, personal experience customers have come to expect in-store.

Aaron Duxfield, Head of Ecommerce at Michael Hill shares his insights at CX Circle Sydney on how they’re using data-driven insights to drive business growth.

The challenge

Before adopting Contentsquare, Michael Hill's analytics environment was fragmented. The team relied mainly on Google Analytics and Looker Studio to track surface-level metrics, but struggled to understand how customers actually interacted with the site, and why friction existed. Key pain points included: 

• Slow time to insight: teams could see what was happening, but not always why—or what to do next. This slowed decision-making and left room for opinion to shape priorities.

• Fragmented views of the customer journey: different teams worked from different reports and data sources, making it difficult to align around shared customer and business priorities.

• Increasing technical dependency: manual tagging, event maintenance, and dashboard creation relied heavily on engineering. The move from Universal Analytics to GA4 highlighted the need for a more scalable and accessible approach to analytics.

"Getting to an answer wasn't quick. It wasn't something every team could do themselves. Insight often sat behind a layer of technical complexity."

Aaron Duxfield

Head of Ecommerce

With digital's share of the business growing quickly and leadership expectations rising, Michael Hill needed more than reports—they needed a platform that could actively inform decisions and drive growth across the organization.

The solution

Michael Hill adopted the Contentsquare experience platform across the business—and it's now embedded in daily decision-making for Trade, Marketing, UX, and Product teams.

Teams use Heatmaps, Journey Analysis, Session Replay, and Product Analytics to understand customer behavior, surface friction, and prioritize improvements with the greatest impact on experience and commercial growth.

Contentsquare's AI agent, Sense Analyst, accelerates the path from question to action. Instead of building every analysis from scratch, teams can ask Sense Analyst to investigate a page or journey, then validate and explore the findings—spending less time on setup and more time on decisions.

“Contentsquare is how we understand why customers behave the way they do, where friction exists, and which optimizations will drive the biggest commercial impact.”

Aaron Duxfield

Head of Ecommerce

How Contentsquare helps Michael Hill: 4 examples 

1. Optimizing campaigns and content in real time

The Trade team is one of the heaviest daily users of Contentsquare—relying on it to understand where customers drop off, how campaigns and landing pages perform, and whether promotional content is gaining traction.

Using Heatmaps, the team uncovered a costly blind spot on their mobile cart page: the "secure checkout" CTA (a critical step in the journey) was hidden below the fold, causing customers to miss it entirely.

They responded quickly: implementing a sticky CTA, testing it through Optimizely, and validating the results in Contentsquare. The outcome was clear: exit rates dropped by -18%, meaningfully improving the mobile experience.

2. From reactive to proactive UX

For the UX team, Contentsquare has shifted how they approach design altogether. Before, the UX team was largely reactive—designing components and responding to feature requests, but without the behavioral evidence needed to drive a proactive CRO roadmap.

Zone-based heatmaps and Session Replay changed that. The team can now build visual evidence for optimization hypotheses—pinpointing exactly where customers struggle and why.

Take checkout for example. Customer details were scattered across the page—email and phone at the top, fulfillment options in the middle, remaining fields further down. Customers were jumping back and forth, creating unnecessary friction.

The fix was straightforward: move fulfillment selection to the top and consolidate the remaining fields. The impact was anything but small—a -15% drop in cart abandonment and a +3% increase in annual revenue.

3. Product decisions tied to customer impact

For the product team, Product Analytics solved two critical challenges: knowing which issues were worth prioritizing, and proving that completed work actually moved the needle.

Before Contentsquare, any complaint from customer service or a passing comment from a senior stakeholder could trigger a scramble to fix it—regardless of real impact. Now, with Impact Quantification, the team can quickly validate how many customers are affected and whether it's moving the needle on conversion or revenue. Aaron explains:

Before Contentsquare, if something came through customer service, we'd treat it as an immediate priority. Now we can quantify the impact—how many customers are affected, where it sits in the journey, whether it's actually hurting conversion. We can go back to stakeholders and say: 'It's in the backlog, but it's only affecting 1% of customers—here are the 10 things we're fixing first because they have a much higher commercial outcome.' It's not about saying no. It's about doing it at the right time, and making sure teams feel empowered to go after the things that matter most.

During a site redesign, the team used Contentsquare to analyze how customers engaged with product imagery on PDPs. When they found thumbnails weren't performing as expected, they acted: switching to a grid layout, refreshing photography guidelines, and making imagery the focal point of the page.

The result? A +4% increase in add-to-cart rate and a +64% increase in average transaction value. The ATV uplift was particularly telling. Better imagery didn't just drive more conversions—it gave customers the confidence to buy higher-value items online.

4. Connecting digital data and in-store behavior  

With a significant share of transactions still taking place in-store, Michael Hill’s is focusing on connecting online behavior to offline outcomes. Aaron’s team has started feeding Contentsquare data into its Snowflake data lake to connect browsing behavior with in-store purchases.

One early discovery challenged a familiar metric: many customers who appeared to abandon their online carts went on to purchase in-store within seven days. In those cases, the shopping bag was functioning more like a wishlist than a failed conversion.

“Our cart abandonment rate might not actually be as high as we think—because a lot of those customers are still purchasing with Michael Hill. They’re just choosing to purchase in-store.”

Aaron Duxfield

Head of Ecommerce

This insight is reshaping how the team thinks about abandonment campaigns, digital strategy, and the role of the website in supporting store sales. 

The result

By embedding Contentsquare across teams, Michael Hill has moved from fragmented reporting to a shared, behavior-led approach to digital growth.

The results go far beyond individual metrics:

• Teams across Trade, UX, and Product can now self-serve insights—without relying on agencies or engineers

• Decisions are driven by behavioral data, not opinion or assumption

• Friction is identified and prioritized faster, with clear commercial validation

• Digital is no longer measured in isolation—it's understood as part of a wider omnichannel story

"Our roadmaps are defined by data now, not opinions. We've got a clear view on what changes are actually going to drive a commercial outcome. That's really important for the team and the confidence the team has—but also translating it up to the executive level."

Aaron Duxfield

Head of Ecommerce

What's next

With more connected data insights than ever before, Michael Hill is starting to explore personalization built on omnichannel data. 

For example, recognizing when an engagement-ring buyer returns to the site and surfacing relevant wedding bands or complementary products based on purchase history. The vision is a connected customer experience in which digital insights inform every touchpoint, online and in-store.