How Shutterfly gained instant cross-platform insights with Contentsquare

Key metrics impacted

The company 

Shutterfly is a leading digital photo service that helps customers preserve and share life's moments through personalized photo products. From photo books and calendars to cards and home décor, Shutterfly enables millions of customers to transform their digital photos into meaningful keepsakes.

Following its 2020 merger with Snapfish, Shutterfly expanded its reach as one of the industry's largest photo product platforms, serving customers across multiple brands and digital touchpoints.

The challenge

For years, Shutterfly faced a persistent challenge: a lack of understanding of how customers move between mobile apps and websites to complete complex purchases.

Chip Lewis, Director of Web Analytics at Shutterfly, had experienced this pain firsthand. The traditional approach of cross-platform analysis—involving hand-coding every interaction, managing separate implementations for iOS and Android, and waiting months for app store releases—was time-consuming, expensive, and often incomplete.

But the real problem ran deeper. 

Shutterfly's customers don't follow linear paths. Building a photo book takes time and commitment, often spanning multiple sessions and devices. Customers start projects on their phones where their photos live, switch to desktop for complex editing, and return to mobile to add more pictures. 

Without a unified view of these cross-platform journeys, Shutterfly struggled to:

• Understand where customers were getting stuck in their journey

• Identify which platform customers preferred for different product types

• Reduce friction points that caused users to abandon projects 

• Make confident decisions about where to invest in digital experience improvements

After a challenging years-long attempt with other platforms, Shutterfly turned to Contentsquare to finally crack the code on understanding customer behavior across all digital touchpoints.

Our users hop back and forth so much between our app and site. The more similar our experiences can be between platforms, the more likely our users are to complete, convert, and avoid confusion.

Chip Lewis

Director of Web Analytics

Learn more by watching Chip’s presentation at CX Circle New York 

The solution

Shutterfly implemented Contentsquare’s tools, which included the Product Analytics suite powered by Heap and Experience Analytics. This combination gave the team the behavioral analytics and product insights they needed to understand the complete customer journey. Here’s how they did it:

1. Auto-tracking eliminates implementation headaches

"The difference with Heap by Contentsquare and other platforms is auto-tracking," Chip emphasizes. "Auto tracking's really the only answer. You immediately get all the data you need."

Unlike traditional analytics tools that require extensive developer resources and months of implementation, Contentsquare's Product Analytics automatically captures user interactions across mobile and web. 

Using Smart Capture, the Shutterfly team could set up core KPIs while auto-tracking handled everything else—dramatically reducing time to value and freeing developers to focus on building better experiences rather than tracking them.

I've never had a good experience implementing mobile app tracking until Heap by Contentsquare. The difference and the reason Heap by Contentsquare is the best answer is because you have auto tracking.

Chip Lewis

Director of Web Analytics

2. User-based data model reveals cross-platform behavior

What sets Contentsquare's Product Analytics apart is its user-based data model. 

"Unlike event-based tracking models, it allows us to track users across platforms and across sessions," Chip shared. This was critical for Shutterfly.

"If you have ever built a Shutterfly photo book, you know it takes a while. It's a real commitment, and very often, your activity takes place across multiple sessions. You move back and forth from your phone as you need more pictures to the website where you build the book."

Contentsquare unlocked insights that were previously invisible, helping the team understand the true customer journey rather than disconnected touchpoints.

These comprehensive cross-platform insights drive Shutterfly's digital strategy, ensuring customers enjoy a seamless experience whether they're adding photos on mobile or designing layouts on desktop.

3. Visual analytics surface friction instantly

Complementing product analytics insights, Shutterfly leveraged Contentsquare's Experience Analytics capabilities—particularly Zone-based heatmaps and Session Replay.

"I've never seen better heatmaps in any product," Chip recalls from his first encounter with Contentsquare. The visual analytics makes it easy for non-technical team members to quickly identify where customers were engaging, where they were getting stuck, and what needed improvement.

Session Replay proves equally valuable. "I'm a huge fan now because you can really dive into experiences and see exactly where users are getting stuck," Chip explained. The ability to search within session replay means the team can quickly find specific behaviors and understand the 'why' behind the data.

4. Journey Analysis reveals platform preferences

Using Contentsquare's Journey Analysis—particularly the sunburst visualization that shows multiple paths simultaneously—the Shutterfly team gained breakthrough insights into cross-platform behavior.

"We've learned a lot about how users jump between platforms," Chip shared. "Initially, this really surprised me how often users move back and forth, but I think in a business like Shutterfly, where you're building things out of your actual photos and all of your photos reside in your phone, in hindsight, I probably shouldn't have been surprised."

Using Contentsquare, the team discovered clear patterns:

• Project initiation: understanding which platform customers prefer to start different types of projects

• Product complexity: simple products like ornaments and gifts are often completed entirely on mobile, while complex products like photo books and calendars are primarily built on desktop

• Time allocation: identifying where customers spend the most time across different brands and platforms

The results

Contentsquare's unified platform has given Shutterfly's digital team a single source of truth for understanding customer behavior across all touchpoints. 

The combination of Contentsquare's Product Analytics and Experience Analytics suites provided:

• Complete visibility into cross-platform journeys: Contentsquare has connected the dots between mobile and web sessions, revealing the true customer journey for the first time

• Faster time to insights: auto-tracking eliminates months of implementation work, while AI-powered features and visual analytics help teams surface insights in minutes instead of days

• Democratized data access: easy-to-understand visualizations mean product managers, designers, and marketers can explore data independently without waiting for analyst support

• Actionable recommendations: the platform doesn’t just show what was happening—it helped teams understand why and what to do about it