Website Optimization & Visitor Task Completion

Michael Whitehouse – Senior Marketing Analyst

Who are we?

• Free website survey for SMBs, co-developed by Avinash Kaushik

• Four questions + advanced user segmentation• Over 2 million respondents• Totally free

• Powerful VOC surveys, measuring all aspects of the user experience

• 5 million actual website visitors

• Over 700 projects for Fortune 2000 companies

• Helping to build a better web since 2000 www.iperceptions.com

www.4qsurvey.com

The User Experience

In Historically Tough Times

“…a few (participants) indicated that more than five to six years would be needed for the economy to converge to a longer-run path characterized by sustainable rates of output growth and unemployment.”

Source: Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, January 27-28, 2009; Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index

Setting the Table

Source: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2658

2008 Holiday Season vs Corresponding Days in 2007: Retail Spending

Total US – Home/Work/University Locations

Consumers hyper-sensitive to cost

http://http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2732

Best Buy Memo

”We can't change the overall level of consumer spending, but we can focus on deepening our relationships with customers wherever we interact with them: in our stores, on our Web sites and through our call centers….We must find ways to win with the customers who are coming to us today.”

Source: The Consumerist (http://consumerist.com/5084305best-buy-to-employees-survive-the-meltdown-by-making-customer-service-a-priority)

Task Completion by Industry

U.S. Retails Lagged Other Markets

Focus on US Retail - % Shares

Research / Learn (34%)

Buy (25%)

Price / Promo Shopping (15%)

Browse / Compare Products (8%)

FunnelActivities

Company Info (10%)

Post-funnel tasks – 8%Post-Funnel Activities

FunnelActivities

Post-Funnel Activities

Consumer recession stretches funnel

Research

Browse

Buy

Old Reality: Compressed Funnel

Company Info

Research

New Reality: Lengthened Funnel

Browse

Promo Shop

Buy• Net out: More Brand Interactions!

Segment-Level Task Completion

Research / Learn (74%)

Buy (56%)

Price/Promo Shopping (74%)

Browse / Compare Products (79%)

Company Info (85%)

What’s stopping buyers?

• Product availability and pricing might be beyond your control as a website marketer. But when you’re driving traffic to your website and these visitors can’t find what they’re looking for and they complain about site usability, these are big issues, and ones that you can fix!

The Advent of Social Shopping?

Optimize for better Usability

Order cart

• “The shopping cart would not let me add anything to it. I tried to call your place of business and it was closed.”

• “I logged in several times and tired to purchase the Esther video or audio to download. When I tried to add to the cart, I received an error message. Really frustrating!”

• “Apparently I shop to slowly….the items in my cart kept disappearing if I wasn’t speedy!”

• “I wanted to purchase a pair of bike shoes, but there was no “Add to Cart” button/function.”

A Winning Set of Tools

There is no magic formula

There are many winning formulas

Provided you know your audience

A Great User Experience Pays Off

Visitors who report great user experiences are:

• Twice as likely to return to the site

• Four times as likely to report enhanced brand opinion

• Four times as likely to report higher future likelihood to purchase

The correlations are clear

Source: Bruce D. Temkin, Forrester Research, “Customer Experience Correlates to Loyalty”http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/customer-experience-correlates-to-loyalty/

Watching without listening

Is this our visitor?

Watching without listening

Listen to Know

Who is here?Why are they here?

How am I doing?What do I need to fix?

Segment - Start with the basics

Then mix in visitor intent

Create Real Delineation

Learn Onsite to research and gather information for a future purchase

Support Onsite to get technical support for a specific product

Shop Onsite with the cognitive intent to make a purchase during the visit

Change Your Site’s Orientation

Tabbed navigation

Use powerful outcome metrics

Average website in North America converts at 2-3%

Conversion

Task Completion

Conversion isn’t always about $

Verbatims = golden nuggets!

Your search results are misleading.

I can’t find links to the support page!

Update your product news ticker.

More than feedback alone

“NEEDBIGGER PICS”

More than feedback alone

“NEEDBIGGER PICS”

More than feedback alone

Is this our visitor?Is this our visitor?

More than feedback alone

Is this our visitor?Or is this our visitor?

More than feedback alone

Let’s try that again…

Your search results are misleading.

I can’t find links to the support page!

Update your product news ticker.

Male,Aged 20-29,2-3 monthly visits

Female, Aged 40-49, First visit

Male,Aged 30-39,Visits weekly

Be systematic and procedural

Listen Measure Test Change

Rinse and Repeat

User experience metrics are evolving

Every survey is an interruption

To which we would add:

• Intercept on arrival

• Be polite

• Sample only what you need

• Put the right questions in front of the right visitors

• Make it snappy

Seth Godin’s Recipe:

• Don’t ask if you don’t care about the answers

• Use questions to plant seeds

• Make it easy to bail

• Entertaining questions

• Shake up the format

What is 4Q?

• A true permission based on-exit survey, developed in conjunction with Google’s Avinash Kaushik, that provides an easy to deploy, easy to use and easier still to analyze framework to answer 4 questions that no website owner can live without.

• It is the antidote for the most pressing of web analytics challenges:

The yearning and struggle to understanding the “Why”.

What is 4Q?

And it’s free.

What is 4Q?

3+1=• Purpose of visit

• Task completion• Open-ended voice of customer

• Customer satisfaction

The 4Q user experience

The visitor experience

The visitor experience

The visitor experience

The visitor experience

The visitor experience

Advanced User Segmentation

Enterprise-Class Reporting Tools

Gratuitous Plug

http://www.4qsurvey.com

Wrapping up: Some takeaways

• Times are tough and sites are feeling the pinch

• Sites are struggling to convert would-be buyers

• There is hope! Let your visitors guide the way

• Two allies: segmentation and measurement

• Be promiscuous and holistic