The company
PLUS Retail is a trendsetter in the Dutch grocery market. For three years running, the cooperative supermarket chain has earned the title “Best National Grocer” for its impressive product assortment, excellent staff and outstanding store appearance.
After merging with Coop in 2022, the brand became the third-largest service grocery retailer in the Netherlands, with approximately 550 stores and a market share of over 10%.
Over the years, the giant retailer has also sought opportunities to meet changing customer demands, including enhancing its website and app. The digital team behind these channels partnered with Contentsquare with a clear goal: Gain actionable insights into customer behavior to provide the best possible shopping experience.
Through the power of data analytics, they sought to leave a mark during crucial customer interactions on PLUS Retail’s website and app.
The challenge
The team lacked actionable data when Arvid Nieuwsma joined as Head of Product at PLUS Retail. “We used to make decisions based on what was happening in the market,” says Arvid. They also relied on Google Analytics. Both sources provided useful information but didn’t offer the detailed insights needed to fully understand and improve customer experiences.
Arvid convinced his team and stakeholders to adopt a digital experience analytics platform, leading them to Contentsquare. This investment fired up their ecommerce optimization efforts. Almost instantly, they could get page-by-page visibility into customer behavior on the website and app they never had access to before.
PLUS Retail's homepage www.plus.nl
The solution
Arvid and his team mainly uncovered actionable insights by using Contentsquare in two ways:
1. Make informed decisions about on-site improvements
Through Journey Analysis, they saw exactly how customers interacted on their website and app—from start to finish. This full-picture view comes from 100% aggregated data, revealing the pages customers visited in the correct order.
This level of granularity enabled them to:
Narrow their focus on PLUS Retail personas via segments
Monitor high-value pages with “Add to basket” call-to-actions (CTAs), such as product detail pages, product listing pages and the homepage
Spot where people drop off to see which pages to optimize
Analyze online customer engagement to make changes that enhance conversion, such as moving elements further up or down the page
2. Implement value-adding experiments
Contentsquare's integration with SiteSpect, an A/B testing solution, allowed the team to conduct experiments and test different scenarios. Successful A/B testing for content significantly enhanced eCommerce performance metrics.
Specifically, it helped the team discover and validate which content resonated best with customers. They then used the user insights to generate an uplift in crucial metrics like revenue, conversions and click rate.
Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability
Contentsquare provides us with invaluable data insights that enable us to test and analyze different scenarios when developing our new eCommerce platform. It helps ensure that the functionality and content of both our website and app are fully optimized.
The results
Thanks to Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics, the team had more insights than ever before.
This access allowed them to quickly make data-driven improvements to PLUS Retail’s website functionality, performance and user experience (UX).
They started conducting sprint reviews and planning every two weeks to prioritize ecommerce optimizations and action the insights they discovered on Contentsquare. This practice ensured and continues to enable them to prioritize user-centric improvements on their website and app.
For Arvid, it wasn’t also just about gathering retail data. He aimed to show stakeholders across the organization the value of data analytics and the impact of his team.
“Adopting Contentsquare was a big milestone for us,” he says.”Our team of conversion, product owners, UX and content specialists have incorporated the platform into their daily work, which actually is the start of data-driven development.”
