When it comes to browsing a retailer’s website, not every click is equal, said Jennifer North, head of digital at Hobbycraft.

Hobbycraft had to learn what parts of its website did and didn’t make sense for its shoppers, what bugs to work out, and what changes its website wasn’t capable of. And after about 12 years with its previous website, it replatformed in March 2022.

It used key insights it had gained from years of web traffic data, North said. And it implemented Contentsquare, a digital experience analytics platform, to better understand changes in its website metrics.

Contentsquare “helped us understand what we needed to protect or keep,” North said. “Then it also gave us the ability to say: Based on what we know through Contentsquare, it’s an opportunity to start meeting customer needs in a different way that we hadn’t been able to deliver on the old site.”

For example, in 2017, Hobbycraft’s share of mobile website traffic “radically changed — almost overnight,” North said. Its share increased 20% to 30%.

“We’d taken that site and that technology and that architectural capability to the absolute Nth degree of what we could do with it,” North said. “We’d also optimized it as far as we could as well. It was a known entity to us, so we knew it very well. It had served us all the way through the pandemic.”

Hobbycraft is a United Kingdom-based retail chain that sells arts and crafts supplies. It ranks No. 361 in the Europe 500, Digital Commerce 360’s database of the largest ecommerce retailers in the region. About 20% of Hobbycraft’s total sales are digital, according to North.

Better understanding user behavior

She said among other features, Contentsquare tracks rage clicking. Rage clicking is when a user repeatedly clicks on part of a website because it doesn’t perform the way the user expects it to.

One such case of this is when Hobbycraft would have a statement near its checkout cart at the top of the page identifying how many items were in a user’s basket.