ContentSquare

Overview

Contentsquare is an enterprise digital experience analytics platform that captures and analyzes every user interaction on a website — mouse movements, clicks, taps, scroll depth, hover patterns, and form interactions. It reconstructs individual and aggregated user journeys into visual heatmaps, session replays, and zone-based engagement metrics. Enterprise teams in retail, financial services, and travel use it to diagnose conversion friction and optimize digital experiences.

What This Script Does

Contentsquare Tag

The Contentsquare tag (t.contentsquare.net/uxa/cs.js) is a large JavaScript library that instruments the entire DOM of the host page. It attaches event listeners to capture user interactions at a high temporal resolution and streams interaction data to Contentsquare's ingestion infrastructure.

Session Replay Engine

The replay engine uses DOM serialization and MutationObserver to record a complete sequence of DOM states across the session. This produces a full playback capability that allows analysts to watch individual user sessions as video-like recordings. Input masking is configurable to exclude sensitive fields, but by default the script captures all user interactions.

Heatmap Aggregation

Click and hover events are tagged with XPath-based element selectors and viewport-relative coordinates, then aggregated server-side into click density heatmaps and move heatmaps. Scroll depth tracking records how far down each page users scroll before leaving.

Cookies Set

• _cs_id — First-party persistent cookie. Stores the Contentsquare visitor identifier. Duration: 13 months (to comply with CNIL guidance).
• _cs_s — First-party session cookie. Stores the current session identifier. Duration: 30 minutes of inactivity.
• _cs_ex — First-party persistent cookie. Stores experiment exposure data for A/B testing segments. Duration: 13 months.
• _cs_c — First-party persistent cookie. Stores the consent state passed by the site's CMP to Contentsquare. Duration: 13 months.
• _cs_vars — First-party session cookie. Stores custom variables defined by the site operator. Duration: session.

Domains Contacted

• t.contentsquare.net — Serves the primary cs.js tracking library.
• api.contentsquare.net — Event ingestion endpoint. All interaction events are streamed here in batched payloads.
• replay.contentsquare.net — Session replay data upload endpoint.

Data Collected Per Interaction

• Complete DOM snapshot at page load and incremental DOM mutation diffs throughout the session
• Mouse cursor X/Y coordinates at configurable sampling rates
• All click events with target element XPath, CSS selector, and text content
• Scroll position in pixels and percentage at regular intervals
• Form field focus and blur events (field values are masked by default)
• Page URL, page title, and referrer
• Session entry source (direct, organic, paid, referral)
• Viewport dimensions and device pixel ratio
• Rage clicks, error clicks, and dead clicks automatically flagged

Consent & Compliance

GDPR / ePrivacy: Contentsquare captures detailed behavioral data — including mouse movements and DOM state — that constitutes personal data when associated with a persistent visitor identifier. The French data protection authority CNIL has specifically addressed session replay tools and requires consent before deployment. Contentsquare's own CNIL-compliant mode limits cookie duration to 13 months and requires CMP integration. Under ePrivacy, the _cs_id persistent cookie requires prior consent.

CCPA / CPRA: Contentsquare collects behavioral data tied to persistent identifiers. This constitutes "personal information" under CCPA. Depending on whether Contentsquare uses this data for its own purposes (benchmarking, product improvement), it may not qualify as a pure service provider, which affects the CCPA sale analysis.

EU-US Data Privacy Framework: Contentsquare is headquartered in France with US infrastructure. EU-to-US transfers are covered by Contentsquare's Standard Contractual Clauses available in their DPA.

Consent Category: Analytics. IAB TCF purposes: Purpose 1 (Store and/or access information on a device), Purpose 8 (Measure content performance), Purpose 9 (Apply market research to generate audience insights).

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Yes. Contentsquare is a session replay and behavioral analytics tool that captures continuous interaction data including cursor position, click targets, and scroll depth. It sets persistent first-party cookies and streams detailed behavioral telemetry. CNIL and other EU DPAs have specifically ruled that analytics tools of this type require prior consent. Do not load the Contentsquare tag until the user has accepted analytics cookies.