Jonathan
Levitt, Vice-President of Marketing for iPerceptions, caught immediately my attention with his article on “the new metrics
that really matter for E-commerce”, since it summarizes very well the
philosophy and concepts behind the “attitudinal approach”.
In spite of
the increased sophistication of Web analytics solutions, with amazing new
functionalities, we are still missing two important parameters for the
performance analysis of a web site :
- Intention (why did the users visit
the site in the first place?)
- Task completion (was their
visit successful, if not why?)
Without
this information, we can only guess why visitors are exiting the site
at a specific step of a process, or why a section has more traffic than an
other one, etc.
iPerceptions (Canada),
ForeseeResults (USA) and CRMMetrix (France) provide extensive solutions to
measure intention and task completion, with sophisticated methodologies for
data collection and segmentation.
There are
often methodological biases when a feedback survey is suggested at the end of a
funnel, since unsatisfied customers are the most likely ones to respond. In the
case of the 3 solutions mentioned before, the feedback survey is suggested to
only a sample of the persons who first enter the site. Consequently, the final
sample will be much closer to the actual
audience of the site.
Another
aspect to mention is that these solutions provide benchmarks with companies in
the same industry (aggregated and non-personal data, of course), which helps to
compare one’s results with others. This feature is very convenient when being
inevitably asked by management: “how do we compare with others ?”.
In order to
ensure consistency of methodology across all customers, these tools are not
available on a self-service basis, and each survey is worked on and validated
with in-house market research analysts.
Consequently,
a significant investment needs to be planned, both on the financial and organisational aspects, in order to prepare the surveys and to analyze the results
on a regular basis.
To get
started with this approach, iPerceptions has released a free, self-serve and
multilingual tool, called 4Q, which enables to ask 4 fundamental questions to your site's visitors:
- How satisfied are my visitors?
- What are my visitors coming to my website to do?
- Are they completing what they set out to do?
- If not, why not?
- If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?
This tool
does not provide benchmarks with other companies, but it is a nice and easy way
to get started with the attitudinal approach.
Set up is quite easy. You just need to add a few lines of Javascript on your homepage,
and that’s it.
It has to
be expected that your management will get hungry for additional information
from your attitudinal survey. In this case, it will be much easier to sell a
broader approach, which requires purchasing a more complete solution.
