How TreeHouse uses Contentsquare to power its CRO program and increase conversions by +25%

Key KPIs

The company

TreeHouse is a Rotterdam-based digital company that develops and manages leading online housing platforms in the Netherlands, including Huurwoningen.nl and Pararius. 

With a strong position in the Dutch rental market, TreeHouse makes it easy for tenants to find a home and for landlords to list their properties.

Bringing product development, marketing, and customer success together under one roof, the team combines data-driven insights, UX design, and marketing expertise to ensure its platforms keep up with the evolving needs of renters and property owners.

This agile approach enables TreeHouse to quickly respond to changes in the housing landscape and deliver high-quality digital experiences, so more people can discover, compare, and secure the right rental home.

The challenge

The team at TreeHouse wanted a truer understanding of how renters were using their platforms—what they were searching for, how they moved through listings, and where potential tenants were dropping off in both their search and subscription journeys.

Before Contentsquare, the team mainly relied on Google Analytics, which gave them high-level metrics but didn’t reveal what renters were actually doing while on their site. With so many visitors and no clear measurement plan to tie their data together, they were left with fragmented insights that weren’t enough to understand user behavior.

At the same time, teams across TreeHouse’s portfolio of housing platforms, including Huurwoningen.nl and Pararius, were working toward ambitious digital goals—increasing overall conversion rates, growing subscriptions on paid sites, boosting property alerts, and reducing support inquiries. 

As TreeHouse kickstarted its conversion rate optimization (CRO) program, these gaps in insight made it difficult to uncover opportunities to improve conversion and overall customer experience. They needed a clearer view of the full customer journey, which led them to Contentsquare.

“The need for deeper insight into user behavior became increasingly relevant since we started working with a CRO specialist to kickstart our CRO program. So, in order to uncover opportunities for improving conversion and overall customer experience, from the first search to the moment users contact an agent, we needed a good tool. That’s why we chose Contentsquare.”

Ramon Caljouw

Digital Growth & Customer Experience Strategist

The solution

TreeHouse’s CRO team began by rolling out Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics product across its main rental platforms. 

Led by Ramon Caljouw, who was brought on as a Digital Growth & Customer Experience Strategist, the team used the Contentsquare to explore what was happening on key pages, spot where changes were likely to have the biggest impact, and decide which ideas to prioritize on their CRO roadmap.

Here’s how they did it:

1. Surface underused high-intent features on mobile

The team used Contentsquare's Zone-based heatmaps capability to visually analyze how mobile visitors interacted with elements on their property listing pages.

The analysis revealed the ‘favorites’ function (a heart icon) had very low engagement when it appeared overlaid on property images. It also showed that visitors who did use this feature were significantly more likely to subscribe than other visitor cohorts—making it a high-intent, yet underutilized action.

To fix this, the team A/B tested moving the ‘favorites’ function into the sticky bar on mobile, which made it consistently visible as users scrolled through listings. As a result, the number of sessions where visitors used the feature increased by +16%.

“Contentsquare helps us to do explorative research and detailed pre-test analyses, to build stronger hypotheses, and determine impact-potential to prioritize our CRO planning. Since we’ve implemented Contentsquare across multiple labels, we can easily compare user behavior. In combination with our server-side A/B testing solution, we use Contentsquare to analyze the impact of A/B tests and gain in-depth insights to refine future experiments.”

Ramon Caljouw

Digital Growth & Customer Experience Strategist

2. Replicate high-performing features across platforms

Because TreeHouse manages multiple housing platforms, the team used side-by-side analysis in Contentsquare's Zone-based heatmap capability to compare how visitors interacted with similar features across their Huurwoningen.nl and Pararius sites.

The team found on Huurwoningen.nl, 17% of visitors used the ‘popular cities’ component on the homepage, while on Pararius, less than 1% of visitors interacted with it, even though the components worked the same way.

Based on this insight, the team moved the ‘popular cities’ block on the Pararius homepage to a more prominent position, guided by how it appeared on Huurwoningen. This change increased the click-through rates (CTR) from the homepage to the search results page by +8%.

The results

Within just nine months of implementing Contentsquare, TreeHouse gathered over 150 actionable insights about customer behavior and built a comprehensive insights library to inform future optimization efforts. 

This data-driven approach transformed their CRO program, leading to:

• 45% A/B test win rate

• +25% increase in overall conversion rate

• +16% increase in ‘favorites’ feature usage on mobile

• +8% increase in CTR from homepage to search results

Beyond the numbers, Contentsquare has become central to how TreeHouse makes decisions. The platform enables better prioritization of A/B tests, more thorough pre- and post-test analysis, and greater data democratization across product teams. 

"Contentsquare helped us to get to know our customer needs much better and was an important asset in our CRO program."

Ramon Caljouw

Digital Growth & Customer Experience Strategist