About Ballantynes
Ballantynes is one of New Zealand’s most iconic department stores, offering premium fashion, accessories, homewares, and lifestyle products. With a strong in-store heritage and a growing online channel, the marketing and eCommerce team is focused on using data to drive smarter digital decisions — from navigation redesigns to conversion funnel optimisation.
The Challenge
Ballantynes had clear ambitions for their digital experience but lacked the visibility to act on them with confidence:
No visibility into errors and their revenue impact: The team had limited insight into the errors and friction points customers encountered on-site, making it impossible to understand or quantify their effect on conversion and revenue.
Navigation changes made without behavioural data: With a complex mega menu spanning multiple departments and categories, Ballantynes needed to understand how customers actually discovered and browsed — not just where they clicked — before making structural changes.
A/B testing without the full picture: The team was running experiments and making content decisions without the granular behavioural layer needed to understand why one variant outperformed another, or what the revenue impact truly was.
As Luzaan Fenner, Head of Marketing and eCommerce, put it: while GA4 shows where customers drop off, the team needed a tool that could reveal exactly what went wrong — by capturing real user behaviour, surfacing errors, and quantifying their impact on conversion and revenue.
The Solution: Partnering with Insightech
Ballantynes partnered with Insightech to gain the behavioural depth they needed across three key focus areas.
Solving navigation with data: Using Insightech’s click analytics and heatmaps, the team reviewed their mega menu navigation to understand how customers discovered and browsed categories. Armed with this data, they repositioned subcategories to better align with customer intent — moving “Shop by Brand” from the first to the final position to encourage exploration of newness, and repositioning a men’s grooming subcategory to its natural home in the Menswear column.
Making A/B testing smarter: Insightech enabled the team to run a targeted test comparing visual versus text-based refinements on PLPs. Rather than relying on a binary win/lose result, they could see exactly how different user segments interacted with each variant, understanding the influence on click-through and revenue at a granular level.
Surfacing unseen errors: By activating Insightech’s Error Module, Ballantynes gained immediate visibility into the errors previously invisible to their team — 363 404 errors, 5,852 dead links, and 1,151 technical errors. Critically, Insightech’s AI analyst Izzy surfaced the highest-impact issues at a glance: critical checkout failures blocking order completion, cart page inventory sync errors affecting mobile users, and a widespread JavaScript error impacting thousands of sessions across the homepage and search.
“While GA4 shows us where customers drop off, Insightech reveals exactly what went wrong — by capturing real user behaviour, surfacing errors, and quantifying their impact on conversion and revenue.”
The Results
Ballantynes’ use of Insightech across navigation, testing, and error detection delivered measurable commercial impact:
- +71% higher revenue from the text-based PLP refinement variant, validated through Insightech’s segmented analysis
- +27% higher click-through rate on product listing pages, driven by the winning A/B test variant
- +16% more revenue from repositioning a navigation category to better match customer shopping behaviour
- Unseen errors quantified and prioritised — checkout failures costing an estimated ~$23,000, plus widespread JavaScript errors impacting over 2,400 sessions, identified and escalated with evidence
- A navigation overhaul informed entirely by real behavioural data, not assumptions
Ballantynes continues to use Insightech to proactively monitor for errors, inform ongoing testing ideation, and build a clearer picture of how customers engage with their digital experience.
