Thoughts on "the new metrics that really matter for E-commerce"

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.