My main use case for ContentSquare involves analysis of A/B testing and user behavior analysis to inform the optimization roadmap and analysis of website development product features.
I can provide a specific example of how I've used ContentSquare for A/B testing and user behavior analysis. We run hundreds of experiments with Adobe Target, which we have integrated with ContentSquare. Whenever we run an experiment, part of the analysis that we do involves creating mapping reports with ContentSquare to analyze behaviors with the element that was A/B tested. We also undertake journey analysis where we actually see what different journeys people took when they were exposed to a test versus not, versus the control. We use this data to help us understand how well the component was designed, how well it influenced behaviors. We use this to understand what features were not too successful in the experiment and to ultimately report on the performance of the experiment and provide clear learnings and recommendations.
We also use ContentSquare for ad hoc analysis. For example, when we are approaching a new optimization roadmap for a section of the website, we will then use ContentSquare as part of our toolkit to investigate how people interact with certain sections of the site, what sections are underused, which ones are most effective at driving conversions. There will be a series of questions that we design beforehand, and then based on those questions, we understand which ones require using ContentSquare to analyze the behavior on the site.
We normally ask team members to go through the training at ContentSquare Academy. There will be fundamental training in there. After that, beyond that, we ask them to practice on the go. There will be many deliverables that involve ContentSquare. We normally pair them with a more senior analyst who shows them around and explains about mappings and different features. That is normally how we do it.
I really appreciate the mapping features that ContentSquare offers. The mappings on ContentSquare are very robust and flexible. They allow you to group elements, and they do not just give you a heatmap of things that were clicked, but you can actually group elements, so you can see insights from different angles. I really appreciate that you can create a segment of people based on a zone mapping and use it for session recording. We also use session recording a lot when analyzing A/B tests, and I very much appreciate the fact that these are very well integrated with Adobe Target. We can very easily create the segments and analyze the data.
The zone mapping and session recording help us because on Adobe Analytics, we track a lot of impact on KPIs ultimately, such as lead generation or revenue and purchases. However, analytics does not always give us a very clear view of how people interacted with that element that we are adding to the page, what was most eye-grabbing from the element or least eye-grabbing. For example, did users swipe to see all the content? There are a lot of insights that ContentSquare gives us visually. I appreciate that you do not have to necessarily upload a screenshot, but it automatically captures the screenshots at different times. So you can see, for example, how did the overlay look versus how did the standard page look. You can see different states of the element that was A/B tested, such as expanded versus collapsed, without needing to worry about it much since it is all automatically captured. Session recording is something that we use because when we struggle to see why something performed or underperformed, session recording allows us to filter users that maybe did not take a successful interaction, basically they did not convert. For example, they interacted with something on the element but did not convert. So we can very easily filter those videos, watch them, and it allows us to see something that with the zone mapping we normally would not see so easily. If people are actually interacting is a question that session recording helps answer. Another feature that I very much appreciate these days is the AI capabilities. It allows us to ask questions, summarize many videos that have been previously filtered, and be able to more quickly identify patterns in the videos and the data.
There are things on ContentSquare platform that I wish we could do better when it comes to governance of the mapping of the page mappings and of the conversion goals. I work in projects of a single brand that has different properties across different markets. For example, the European, the French market versus the German, versus the UK and so forth. At the moment, all of these properties exist in silos. They do not share any shared governance. They do not have a common page mapping or common understanding of metrics. They all have to be defined on a property-by-property basis, which opens up a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of recreating mappings across properties. It could be much more seamless if ContentSquare could provide better governance features for the platform.
There will be many experiments that we run that are based on ContentSquare data. Some of them involve identifying elements on a page that attract a high level of interest, but that are maybe buried too deep on a page. Recently, we ran an experiment in which we surfaced a component up on a page. I think it was a grade selector, or a selector of different specs of a product. By moving that up, there was a substantial increase in engagement and also an improvement in the conversion rate, in this case, lead generation, for an automotive sector client.
The key weaknesses in ContentSquare platform are in the context of multi-market clients and the governance capabilities. At the moment, every property, every market has separate page mappings, separate metric configurations, separate segments, separate everything. Every one has a different configuration. Although ContentSquare does a good job at putting in place some basic level readings, I have found that these are not strong enough. They are not aligned as closely to the source of truth that the company uses. Ultimately, in every market or property, people will edit those mappings, and it will break them or make them non-comparable. Another big feature that we are lacking is the ability to run analysis across multiple markets. Right now, we find ourselves having to do the same report in every property and then comparing side-by-side. With other suites that we have seen, such as Quantum Metric or FullStory, you are able to create, for example, a zone mapping for a specific template across markets and get aggregated data. This is often really useful for my team that works across multiple markets, and that capability is not present in ContentSquare, which makes our lives much more complicated in the long term.
I think that journey mappings could be improved a little bit. I find the sharing capability of the journey map is a bit weak. I would also appreciate to see improvements across using AI for journey mapping, which I do not think is too good or is non-existent at the moment. However, I think for me, the platform is solid. It is a really good platform. We really appreciate it, but those areas about governance and multi-market capabilities are really the biggest weaknesses in our opinion.
Regarding ContentSquare's AI capabilities, I think it is helpful from the point of view that it does a good job of summarizing videos. However, I believe that it misses a lot of business context when it comes to analyzing that could be used to provide better analysis. It looks at the page as a thing with controls that you can swipe left and right and scroll up and down and click on things, but it does not consider or understand the name of the component and what that component does in the context of the journey. For example, this is the component to customize the car. Therefore, I believe that there is a big opportunity to provide business context to the AI so that it can actually offer much more meaningful analysis.
When it comes to metrics creation, I see that it is not as robust as our analytics suite where it aggregates, for example, multiple types of conversions on a single metric, and where metrics can be created out of data layer events or analytics events. Generally speaking, ContentSquare is a bit more limited. It allows you to create goals based on interactions or page views. This ability of aggregating multiple conversions into a single one seems to be lacking, and it is a very annoying shortfall for us because we tend to report on these aggregated conversions at the end of the day.
We do not use ContentSquare to measure the impact of or success of experiments because, as I was explaining before, ContentSquare does not have the same robustness in metrics as our analytics suite. It does not have metrics that are aggregated in multiple conversions. It does not have metrics that are centrally governed and centrally defined, and this means that we cannot reliably use ContentSquare to measure those important KPIs. We use ContentSquare to complement the data that we see in analytics, adding in-page behavior data, but never to report on the main KPIs.
All data captured by ContentSquare is masked, so we do not capture any data, for example, on forms. It is all anonymized. We do not capture any PII in the platform.
I find maintaining ContentSquare very manual because every property needs its own maintenance. ContentSquare does the initial setup, but after that, the setup does not get updated as the website evolves. Maybe new products are added or URLs change. So it is very manual. There should be a more centrally governed mapping, for example, that is managed instead of individual mappings per property.
I have been using ContentSquare for around four years.
ContentSquare's scalability is poor. As I was saying, every property is individual, separate from the others. It does not have multi-market analysis, and it is as each property is its own independent project, which is not very scalable.
ContentSquare's customer support is good. It is strong. We always get answers, they are very helpful, jump on calls promptly and reply quickly.
I did not previously use a different solution before ContentSquare.
ContentSquare is deployed through the tag manager. I believe it is through Adobe Launch or Adobe Tags, whatever it is called these days. It is not on-premise, so I think it would be on public cloud.
It is helpful, but a lot of the time we contact our ContentSquare rep and speak with them about our questions and use cases. Although, we rarely do this. Most times we are able to use the platform. It is very intuitive, and most times we are able to get what we want from it.
I would advise others looking into using ContentSquare to carefully consider the situation in which they want to use it. If it is a multi-market or multi-brand, particularly multi-market type of setup, they should be very mindful about the lack of governance and the poor features that it has for this type of context. We have seen other platforms perform much better in this space, allowing for a much more centrally governed, scalable setup. But if the person is looking for a single brand suite, or a global setup or something of that nature, then I think it is an excellent solution.
I know that they integrated with our analytics platform not too long ago. I never got to see what capabilities that might offer or how that might enrich ContentSquare. It would have been good to actually get to see a demo of that in action.
I would rate this review as a seven out of ten.
