- May 13, 2008
- 2 comments
Your site analytics clickstream data tell you what is happening on your site , but it never tells you why. To understand why site visitors do what they do , you need to listen to them. That’s one of the lessons taught by our friend Avinash Kaushik. Voice of Customer data was usually missing from the clickstream-heavy first generation of web analytics. Just about a year ago, Avinash offered an ultra-simple 3-question survey to site owners seeking to bridge that gap.
- What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
- Were you able to complete your task today?
- If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?
Three simple, critical questions to help you start optimizing your site for the outcomes most important to your visitor. The answers allow you to segment your site visitors by their primary purpose, track task completion rate, and understand what your site can do better to help grease the skids instead of getting in the way.
Powerful stuff, but some site owners lack a survey tool to ask these questions. Avinash has recently collaborated with the folks over at iPerceptions to offer 4Q, a free tool to remove that obstacle. Currently in beta, 4Q can help you build and analyze a primary purpose survey for your site. Take a look at the video to see Avinash walk through set up and basic capabilities ( You’ll learn what that 4th question is when you watch).
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Great tool in theory. I’d love to gain valuable insight from our visitors. However…the skeptic in me thinks that even though Avinash promises there is no catch…there is in fact a catch and its built right in. It’s the annoyance factor.
Surely I can’t be the only one who has found themselves frustrated when interrupted on the web and asked for a quick “favor”.
I wonder…are there some quantitative metrics that show the benefits of these surveys out-weigh the costs? The cost to me is the number of visitors who drop off the second they see that survey. How many folks in fact leave as a result of that? Obviously every site would be different…but is there an average rate one could expect?
Thanks for any feedback and hat tip to Avinash for releasing that tool.
Ironically, the TSA just complained in their blog that they were not able to get their visitors to comment. I recommended that they check out this blog posting and spend a few hours with the RKG team. I think this post is a great start in helping website owners to start thinking about more than just the mechanics of website design and start thinking about the human-computer interfaces that drive behavior.