Link: Metrics Insider » Blog Archive » Attitude Check.
Posted April 18th, 2008 by Jim Sterne
Measuring
click-throughs, pageviews and revenues is revealing, but it's a bit
like asking an in-store shopper how well they like your store based on
the time of day they came in, which aisles they went down and how much
they bought. Figuring out if they enjoyed the experience is a different
story.
Recency and frequency can give you some insights about loyalty
and time on-site might be indicative of a positive visit, but you won't
be able to measure whether your visitor thinks your site is great or
ghastly unless you ask them.
Classic Web analytics data (what did they click on?) has been
referred to as data-rich but information-poor. You can tell exactly
where people dropped out of a purchasing process or where they stopped
reading a long story, but you're never going to know why.
Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, puts it this way:
"When you read log file or sophisticated analytics reports, you surmise
where to focus your attention. But when you look at actual customer
comments, they'll tell you where you need work. Then use the analytics
to figure out how well you're fixing the problem."
Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO of iPerceptions, thinks attitudinal metrics
are important enough to give away for free. His company's 4Q program
(4q.iperceptions.com) is a free pop-up survey that asks your visitors:
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?
Very simple and very insightful. No, this is not going to give you
in-depth, rolling satisfaction scores. That's what iPerceptions does
for a living. No, this is not going to give you in-depth, industry
comparisons between your firm and others. That's what ForeSee Reults
does for a living. But i4Q will give you a little bit of the
all-powerful Voice of the Customer that will tell you where to start
fixing things that you may not know are going wrong.
Attitudinal information is not the alternative to clickstream data.
Visitor complaints give you a clue about your site's effect on
visitors, but you have to look at clickstream data, see where visitors
went on the site, and what they did. That combination is critical. "I
couldn't find your phone number." is a strong message that there's
something wrong with your Contact Us page. Unless they never got to
your Contact Us page. In that case, there's a problem with your menu
system.
How did people who had successful visits get from the home page to
the shopping cart? Where did the unhappy folks bail out? Where did the
unhappy people get flummoxed? Of those who deemed themselves
successful, how many are likely to return and buy again? How did their
clickstream differ from those who were successful but said they were
unlikely to return? Did the happy/successful people click on something
more often than those who left unfulfilled?
The attitudinal part of all of comes from asking people whether they were successful in accomplishing their
goals, instead of focusing exclusively on your own. Those who were
happy about their Web site experience show up at once end of the
spectrum, those who were not, at the other end.
Attitudinal metrics give you a little more view into the hearts and
minds of your marketplace. That's just what we've been hoping for.
The information just fell in my mailbox as Charlie Holbrech send out a communication to IndexTools partners & 
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