How to increase conversions on retail sites with Contentsquare

With conversions in decline across retail sites, simply having a digital presence isn’t enough. To turn things around, retailers need to know what’s really driving their customers: what makes them click, scroll, and hesitate. 

This guide dives into benchmark conversion data for retail sites and outlines actionable strategies for using Contentsquare's experience intelligence platform to reverse the downward trend and improve return on investment (ROI).

Key data points on the current conversion landscape for retail sites

Several significant trends in Contentsquare’s 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report highlight the challenges and opportunities for retail sites:

• Overall conversion has dropped. The conversion rate fell by 6.2% overall, with new customer conversion rates dropping by 7.4% and returning customer conversion rates by 6.4%. When broken down by device, desktop visitors' conversion rate dropped by 8.5%, and mobile users by 3.8%.

• Desktop users convert better than mobile users, with rates of 3.81% and 2.03% respectively. But, mobile users make up 75.9% of retail traffic.

• Consumer Electronics saw the biggest drop in conversions: from 2.03% to 1.28%. 

• Unpaid channels converted better overall than paid ones: while paid channels converted at 1.7% on average between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, unpaid ones converted at 2.4% on average over the same period. 

• Paid social is the worst-converting channel: while paid social traffic rose by 8.9% in 2024, conversions dropped by 11.9%

• Organic search and organic email are relatively on par, with conversion rates of 1.98% and 1.97% respectively between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024.

• Engagement drives conversion: websites that increased their session depth in 2024 saw +5.4% higher conversion rates. Conversely, those sites with decreased session depth saw conversion rates fall by 13.1%.

4 strategies to boost conversions on retail sites

Conversion isn't just one click—it’s the result of many connected actions. Here’s how you can optimize for engagement every step of the way:

1. Analyze your highest-converting journeys

Not all users have the same experience of your site, and they don’t all visit the same pages. But, you can track your highest-converting journeys with Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability. 

Segment users who complete high-value actions, such as ‘add to cart’ or ‘checkout’, and then analyze their journeys to understand what led them to convert. Use these insights to repeat effective paths across similar pages and flows. 

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis uses a sunburst visualization to show how users move through your site.

Journey Analysis also helps you understand which channels drive users to your site and how that channel impacts what happens next. Start a chat with Sense, Contentsquare’s built-in AI, to make analyzing complex journeys easier: simply ask Sense to analyze the graph, or be specific about your query.

Chat with Sense in plain language and get easy-to-understand insights, right in your Contentsquare dashboard.

💡Pro tip: mobile and desktop users convert at different rates and can jump between devices when browsing or making a purchase, which is why you need tools that can track your users every step of their journey.

Journey Analysis allows you to track users across multiple devices and sessions, helping you unify traffic data and see where cross-device experiences might be hindering acquisition performance. This helps you optimize paths to keep users engaged and moving forward.

To dive even deeper, Contentsquare’s Product Analytics powered by Heap, helps you uncover how many sessions users need before they purchase, tracks how long it takes for new users to engage, and shows you how users navigate complex processes across different devices.

Product Analytics in action

2. Discover where (and why) users drop off before converting

Knowing what converts is essential to replicating those patterns. But it's also important to understand where these high-value journeys go wrong. Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis capability analyzes specific conversion paths and identifies where users abandon journeys so you can optimize to remove blockers.

While funnels are great to analyze conversions from one step to another, they’re not always representative of the journeys of your actual users. Refine your funnel flow by looking into the pages users visit between 2 steps. 

Funnel Analysis highlights clear drop-off points, which are often reflective of friction on your pages or the navigation between them. If you’ve found friction points, explore them further by jumping to relevant session replays to gain a complete understanding of the user's journey and the context behind the drop.

A visual breakdown of a session replay in Contentsquare

Drill down further into funnel data for deeper analysis, such as comparing ‘new’ vs. ‘returning’ segments or different geographies, device types, marketing channels, and more to understand which segments convert best (and worst).

⚡Success story: how Clarins drove conversions from new product lines

When leading luxury skincare and cosmetics brand Clarins launched a new line of day and night moisturizers, they noticed conversion from the Moisturizers product listing page (PLP) didn’t match expectations.

Using Journey Analysis, they realized users kept navigating back and forth between the PLP and the day and night product detail pages (PDPs).

They hypothesized the imagery for the two types of moisturizer looked too similar. They A/B tested adding sun and moon icons to differentiate between creams using the AB Tasty and Contentsquare integration and found an increase in conversions on the Moisturizers PLP.

Read the full Clarins case study here

3. Identify and track all conversions

Turning site visitors into customers is the goal, but there are plenty of micro-conversions on your retail site that can help boost that number.

Aim to capture both high-value actions (like checking out) and early intent signals (like favoriting products or adding to wishlists). This provides a fuller picture of user progression through your funnel and helps you engage them sooner.

More engaged users convert at a higher rate. Once you’ve identified high- and low-converting journeys, there’s a point where you need to look at page-level details to understand what’s working and what isn’t, what users engage with, and what they ignore.  

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps capability helps you do just that: heatmap analysis shows you which page elements—like product images, ‘related products’ carousels, or menu bars—attract attention, drive engagement, or contribute to conversions.

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps shows you where users click, hover, and scroll at page level.

You can then apply these insights to elevate high-performing elements and restructure page layouts, ensuring users are consistently engaged from the moment they land on your site. 

Zoning analysis can help you go even further and maximize content effectiveness by understanding the exposure, conversion, and revenue contribution of content or page elements.

⚡Success story: How Lovehoney gained a +30% increase in conversions with Heatmaps 

Lovehoney, the U.K.'s most popular online shop for buying adult toys and sexy lingerie, wanted to assess the performance of one of their landing pages. Using Heatmaps, they discovered the conversion rate per click was 13.5% on the page’s ‘Sort’ and ‘Filter’ buttons—but the click rate for those same buttons was low. 

The team redesigned the page by pulling the 3 main categories out of the dropdown and onto the page itself. This led to a significant uptick in user interaction with the filters, which resulted in a +30% increase in conversions.

Read the full case study here

Every website is different and there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for conversion-boosting elements. However, identifying high-performing elements and repositioning them for optimum exposure can significantly increase conversions. 

⚡Success story: How Space NK increased checkout conversion by +30%

Using Contentsquare, niche beauty brand Space NK observed users who clicked on product reviews had a much higher add-to-bag rate (28.8%), compared to those who didn’t (12.6%).

From then on, the goal for the team was to increase interactions with the 'Review Stars', a micro-conversion that often led to a higher add-to-bag conversion rate. 

Altering the color of review stars and updating call-to-action (CTA) copy yielded an increase in overall conversions by +30%.

I’ve never come across a tool that does everything that Contentsquare does. In my previous jobs, you had to cobble together data and insights from lots of different places. It’s great to be able to go to Contentsquare and have it give you a full range of insights.

Eleanor Middleton

Senior Content Manager

Read the full case study here

1. Listen to customer feedback

Some of your users may be intent on making a purchase on your retail site, but sometimes, they just… can’t. It’s not for lack of trying: the issue may lie with your site and a rogue bug plaguing your conversion rate.

One way to quickly identify those harder-to-see conversion obstacles is to let your own users tell you about them, so you can fix the issue as soon as possible.

With Contentsquare’s Voice-of-Customer (VoC) product, you can set up surveys and then use Sense to automatically tag responses by sentiment, topic, and keywords. Search and filter for negative feedback and jump directly to the session recordings that led to it. Place an exit-intent survey on key pages of your conversion flow to continuously discover new ideas for optimizing user experiences, respond rapidly to complaints, and reduce churn.

Sentiment analysis inside Contentsquare’s Surveys capability highlights negative feedback and their source. Dive into survey responses to understand what happened to those users and use AI-powered survey analysis to spot conversion opportunities faster. Ask Sense natural language questions and get instant charts, explanations, and recommendations to help your team act faster and with more confidence.

Breaking down user feedback by sentiment in Contentsquare

So you can act on negative feedback as soon as it’s received, connect Surveys to Slack or Microsoft Teams. Your team can also create a Jira ticket within the platform.

⚡Success story: how Diptyque increased in conversion rate for mobile users by +9% with Contentsquare

Using Contentsquare, luxury fragrance brand Diptyque noticed 15% fewer conversions from their mobile users were converting compared to desktop users. Looking into customer feedback, the team found complaints specific to mobile users about having to set up a new password every time they checked out. 

They also noticed that new users were feeling confused by how the site’s login interface worked.

After A/B testing several variations of their checkout flow, conversions increased by +9% from their mobile users.

Read the full case study here

💡Pro tip: you can also use experience monitoring capability like Contentsquare’s Error Analysis to keep an eye on technical issues that may be jeopardizing your conversion rate. Monitor errors on specific pages proactively by setting up dedicated alerts.

Try Contentsquare to increase conversions on your retail site

By applying these strategies and using Contentsquare’s advanced experience intelligence platform, you can create experiences that not only delight your customers but also consistently drive higher conversions.