How to use Contentsquare during peak seasons to boost sales and conversions

Peak seasons are a golden opportunity to get your hands on first-party data like never before. During these high-traffic periods, you can collect invaluable insights about how your customers think, feel, and interact with your site as hundreds—or maybe even thousands—flock to it. 

If you're unsure where to begin, don’t sweat it—an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare can make all the difference. This article gives you clear steps to take to process the wealth of data waiting in the midst of high-traffic times.

Nothing beats creating user-centric products, services, and experiences to amplify sales and conversions.

Contentsquare offers behavior analytics tools that let you optimize and deliver an excellent UX during a traffic surge. And these same tools remain available throughout the year to sustain your growth goals—bonus!

Through the quantitative and qualitative data you find on Contentsquare, you can:

• See what users do on your site and understand why they behave a certain way

• Uncover issues users face and fix them immediately

• Access the user-related metrics that matter to your business

Peak traffic period ready: 6 ways to improve UX through Contentsquare

1. Launch surveys to hear straight from users

Capture user feedback during high seasons using any of Contentsquare’s survey templates. You can also create your own survey from scratch, adding as many custom questions as needed. 

Even a single-question survey can provide quick insights into how you are doing or what you should do. Consider a simple question like: what’s one thing you wish our website offered that it doesn’t already?

Riot uses an open-ended question to collect insights into opportunity areas

What you can do with Contentsquare Surveys: frustrated visitors will leave your website and choose your competitor instead. When this happens, trigger an exit-intent survey to show on the most-exited pages. Ask visitors why they’re leaving and what you could do to improve.

A two-question exit-intent survey to find out why people leave your site

Look for a pattern in their responses to find the source of their frustration. And then prioritize a fix to prevent more users from bouncing off your page before they could perform a desired action.

2. Monitor the checkout flow using VoC 

Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer (VoC) tools allow you to get all sorts of feedback from your users. It can come in the form of a widget—a nifty interactive button—on your website that lets people rate their experience and provide additional context.

Collecting user feedback via widget allowed Hussle users to give in-the-moment feedback when they encountered issues

What you can do with VoC tools: set up a feedback widget on the checkout flow to ensure you can get in-the-moment user feedback for any issues they might encounter.

This way, you can see whether a page element is causing problems and spot a serious issue before it affects hundreds of users—or more. Immediately identify a solution to prevent users from hitting a snag as they try to complete the checkout process on your site.

Hear directly from your users with Contentsquare’s feedback widget

💡Pro tip: integrate your Slack account with Contentsquare, so you can receive alerts and stay aware of the most important user feedback.

Easily connect your Slack account to Contentsquare and start getting alerts immediately

3. Build your own customizable dashboard 

Contentsquare’s dashboards offer a visual overview of some of your most valuable metrics.

What you can do with Dashboards: keep an eye on your most important metrics on the dashboard to easily spot trends and quickly solve issues.

For instance, the last thing you would want for your ecommerce customer experience (CX) is a broken checkout button—the cause of many abandoned carts and a huge drop in traffic. But if you keep an eye on your dashboard and notice an unusual bounce rate uptick on your checkout pages, this could be a sign that there is an issue, so you can get it fixed before it's too late.

💡Pro tip: customize your dashboard for the holiday season so that you can easily find all your relevant metrics. Switching between multiple analytics tools is a time-sink when you’re already very busy catering to the influx of customers.

Create a dashboard with Contentsquare in seconds

4. Glean insights into user behavior and page performance through heatmaps

A heatmap lets you analyze complex site data through color-coded representations. The visual cues vary by hue or intensity, allowing you to understand the represented values in seconds.

Wyldsson used heatmaps to uncover problem areas on their then-freshly revamped webstore

What you can do with Contentsquare Heatmaps: expect a spike in new user count when the holiday season starts, which means it’s important to keep track of first-time users’ experience on your site. 

Go to Heatmaps and segment by ‘new users’ to see how this segment is behaving on your most important pages. Returning users would already be familiar with your site, but maybe your new users would need guidance to find their way to the checkout page.

Create a new segment for new users in Contentsquare Heatmaps to see how they interact with your website

Here’s another way to use heatmaps: busy periods bestow additional traffic to less popular pages. So during this time, you might have a bunch of pages with more heat data than they had previously. 

This event creates the perfect opportunity to analyze pages that didn't get much traffic earlier in the year. You now have the chance to collect essential information about what and how to improve.

5. Use session replay to validate your assumptions and drive results

Session recordings (or replays) are renderings of real user actions—such as clicks, scrolls, and taps—on a website. They’re used to gain a better understanding of how users interact with a site, making it easier to spot issues, optimize UX, and enhance conversion rates as a result.

Session replays revealed that a broken feature on Audiense’s sign-up form was causing conversions to dip

What you can do with Contentsquare Session Replay: spot small issues and improve your conversion rate immensely. There are two ways to go about this:

• Jump into your replays if you detect an increase in rage clicks and u-turns (instances where users go to a page and then quickly return to the previous one) or any other important metric in your dashboard.

• Even if everything seems fine, block some time daily to watch replays. Sort by Frustration Score and watch the most relevant session replays on your important pages from the last 24 hours. 

Sort your replays by frustration score to find out why your users rage clicked or dropped off

6. Achieve more by combining Contentsquare features and tools

The best part of being on Contentsquare’s all-in-one platform is you can complement one tool with another. This capability enables you to know when users hit a snag and fix it, get buy-in for your improvement ideas, and ultimately polish the conversion process.

So while you’re in the swing of things, tap into the power combos available on Contentsquare:

• If you have a Contentsquare NPS® survey or feedback widget set up, filter the recordings by ‘hate’ comments and detractors to find out why they're unhappy. Even if users don't reveal much in those surveys, the replays might help you find the reason they're frustrated and decide what to fix.

• Lots of campaigns come with the holiday season! So filter sessions relevant to seasonal campaigns. Use the referrer URL filter or events to isolate the sessions that occurred as a result of a campaign, and see if users coming from that campaign are experiencing the site as expected.

• Leverage Contentsquare’s powerful built-in AI feature to streamline your workflow during peak season. For example, use it to summarize replays or analyze user sentiment in survey results to free up your time to focus on high-priority tasks that drive results.

Combine Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool with its powerful built-in AI capabilities to streamline your workflow

📖 Real-life case study: Contentsquare in action

Retail giant Halfords turned to Contentsquare’s Session Replay and VOC tools to tackle the challenges of peak-season traffic. 

By identifying friction points and optimizing the online shopping journey, Halfords not only captured more sales but also improved customer satisfaction, with their Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) increasing by 2.4% over two months.

They also saw a 15% boost in conversion rates on their Black Friday Hub page, translating to millions in additional sales during their busiest period.

Attract returning customers, in and out of season

There you have it: Contentsquare tools and features are built to sustain your sales and conversion goals during busy seasons. You can use them alternately, or to complement each other, depending on your needs during high-traffic periods.

So, don’t just sit on that first-party data when the peak season comes. Use Contentsquare to mine it and glean meaningful insights that will help you improve the user experience. Remember: happy, satisfied customers keep coming back, no matter the time. And through continued user research and UX testing, you can give them plenty of reasons to do just that.