The company
Specsavers is an international optical and audiology retailer with 2,400 stores worldwide, employing over 38,000 people. It has 12 websites globally run by regional marketing teams supported by a central team led by Global Head of Digital Analytics and Technical SEO, James Saukinsey.
The digital analytics & technical SEO team is responsible for monitoring and analyzing digital journeys, user behavior and website performance. This involves measuring and verifying that global websites are optimized, accessible, indexed, and readily crawl-able by Google.
The challenge
With a strong focus on providing the best-in-class experience for customers online, James’ team wanted to
Get a better, more holistic understanding of their customer behavior and journeys.
Measure and quantify the impact of web performance metrics, such as site speed, on key business metrics.
The team already had a mix of different web performance tools in place but needed a more comprehensive solution that would combine both behavioral and performance data analysis into a single view.
Before Contentsquare, we had no way of tying together website performance metrics like Core Web Vitals and conversion. With Contentsquare, we’re now able to make decisions based on data, and see the direct, quantifiable impact of changes on our customer behavior.
The solution
Specsavers decided to implement Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis capability globally, which combines both real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring to provide in-depth web performance insights.
Specsavers can check vital website metrics (like page loading times) to see poorly performing pages in Contentsquare's Speed Analysis
At the same time, they extended their implementation of Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics globally, beyond the 3 sites they already had it implemented on.
“We didn’t want to be in a position where we only measured site speed in three markets, so we introduced Contentsquare globally,” says James. “And although rolling out a new platform across multiple markets was always going to be a challenge, the support we’ve received from Contentsquare has, as always, been fantastic.”
Having successfully implemented Contentsquare, Specsavers can now combine customer behavioral data with website performance metrics to easily quantify the impact of website performance on key metrics like conversion and bounce rate.
Plus, having one seamless platform to work with has enabled James’s team to work more efficiently.
“Rather than having to use two separate tools with separate logins to analyze behavior and performance data, we’re now able to use one tool for everything,” says James. “As you can imagine, this has sped up our work significantly.”
Back-end replatforming: measuring the impact of site speed on conversion
Before the go-live date of a back-end PHP re-platforming project, James’ team used Contentsquare to set up synthetic Core Web Vital checks across the site, helping establish a baseline of performance figures for comparison. They also set up real user monitoring in order to segment users with good and bad Core Web Vital scores.
After the update went live, Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis capability allowed the team to quantify the impact of slow site speed on conversion—something James says “wouldn’t be possible without Contentsquare”.
James and his team could see that customers with slowest Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores were more likely to leave the site straight away and less likely to convert. But on top of that, “Contentsquare shows us that users who experience faster site speed are more likely to click on CTAs, convert better and follow a more linear journey,” says James.
The results
Analysis in Contentsquare has enabled Specsavers to quantify the impact of the back-end platform update on key business metrics. They’ve seen a significant improvement in site performance for users with slow connections*:
+33% conversion rate of optics booking
+24% eCommerce purchase rate
-25% reduction in bounce rate
*33% of total sessions where any page has Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) >4 seconds or First Contentful Paint (FCP) >5 seconds or Time To First Byte (TTFB) >1.2 seconds.
Specsavers is a mission-led business focused on helping people's sight and hearing, so having a tool like Contentsquare to understand customer behavior and journeys and make them better is really important. And it's only going to become more important as our eCommerce channel grows and we start providing more of our services online.
What’s next?
Specsavers has more replatforming projects coming up, from upgrading its CMS (Content management system) to migrating its eCommerce system.
Contentsquare will play a pivotal role in helping measure the impact of these projects on Specsavers’ customer experience, as well as helping to improve that experience.