The company
PLUS Retail is a trendsetter in the Dutch grocery market. For 3 years running, the cooperative supermarket chain has earned the title 'Best National Grocer' for its impressive product assortment, excellent staff, and outstanding store appearance.
After merging with Coop in 2022, the brand became the third-largest service grocery retailer in the Netherlands, with approximately 550 stores and a market share of over 10%.
Over the years, the giant retailer has sought opportunities to meet changing customer demands, including enhancing its website and app. The digital team behind these channels partnered with Contentsquare to achieve a clear goal: gain actionable insights into customer behavior to provide the best possible shopping experience.
Through the power of data analytics, they sought to improve crucial customer interactions on PLUS Retail’s website and app.
The challenge
When Arvid Nieuwsma, Head of Platform and Tech at PLUS Retail, joined the company, his team lacked actionable data. “We used to make decisions based on what was happening in the market,” says Arvid. They also relied on Google Analytics. Both sources provided useful information but didn’t offer the detailed insights needed to fully understand and improve customer experiences.
Arvid convinced his team and stakeholders to adopt a digital experience analytics platform, leading them to Contentsquare. This investment fired up their ecommerce optimization efforts. Almost instantly, they got page-by-page visibility into customer behavior on the website and app—something they'd never had access to before.
PLUS Retail's homepage
The solution
Here's how Arvid and his team used Contentsquare to uncover actionable insights:
1. Make informed decisions about on-site improvements
Through Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability, they saw exactly how customers interacted on their website and app—from start to finish. This full-picture view comes from 100% aggregated data, revealing the pages customers visited in the correct order.
This level of granularity enabled them to:
Narrow their focus on PLUS Retail personas via segments
Monitor high-value pages with 'Add to basket' call to actions (CTAs), such as product detail pages, product listing pages, and the homepage
Spot where people drop off to see which pages to optimize
Analyze online customer engagement to make changes that enhance conversion, such as moving elements further up or down the page
2. Implement value-adding experiments
Contentsquare's integration with A/B testing solution SiteSpect, allowed the team to conduct experiments and test different scenarios. Successful A/B testing content significantly enhanced the company's ecommerce performance metrics.
Specifically, it helped the team discover and validate which content resonated best with customers. They used these insights to generate an uplift in crucial metrics like revenue, conversions, and click rate.
Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability
Contentsquare provides us with invaluable data insights that enable us to test and analyze different scenarios when developing our new ecommerce platform. It helps ensure that the functionality and content of both our website and app are fully optimized.
The results
Thanks to Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics product, the team has more insights than ever before.
This allows them to quickly make data-driven improvements to PLUS Retail’s website functionality, performance, and user experience (UX).
They've started conducting sprint reviews and planning every 2 weeks to prioritize ecommerce optimizations and action the insights discovered with Contentsquare. This practice enables them to prioritize user-centric improvements on their website and app.
For Arvid, it wasn’t just about gathering retail data. He aimed to show stakeholders across the organization the value of data analytics and the impact of his team.
“Adopting Contentsquare was a big milestone for us,” he says. "Our teams of conversion, product, UX, and content specialists have incorporated the platform into their daily work, which is the start of data-driven development.”
