Website task completion: a linguistic approach?

In recent posts, we've touched on 5 reasons why task completion is the ultimate survey question, as well as discussing the visitor segments for whom task completion is the most potent predictor of visitor loyalty. But these posts were both predicated on the notion of a company/brand's attempt to measure the effectiveness of its online presence through an online survey. But what if a company wants to apply the logic of task completion to feedback that occurs organically (on the web or elsewhere), feedback that cannot easily be stuffed into the "yes/no" binary of a standard online survey question? I'm thinking tweets, blogs, forum posts, Facebook wall posts, and the like.

As it turns out, there may in fact be a useful linguistic approach to measuring task completion, also. An upcoming iPerceptions white paper will examine the open-text responses from thousands of online survey respondents who indicated that they did not complete their primary onsite tasks. One of the conclusions will be that there is a cyclical, staged logic to these pieces of verbatim commentary. These stages in the task completion journey can be described in terms of ways of speaking:

Intention -> Attempt -> Restriction -> Frustration -> Start again (hopefully!)

A real world example of this progression would sound like:

"I came to your website to book tickets (Intention). I tried using the booking engine (Attempt), but I got persistent error messages (Restriction). I was really upset and I'm disappointed in your website (Frustration). I'll try again later this week (Start again - you're lucky if you get this one!)."

As the white paper will show, these patterns repeat themselves across verbatim comments with a high degree of consistency. Perhaps this is a key, then, that will open up the ability to measure task completion outside the purview of online surveys--in places where open-text data occurs organically, places like social networks, user forums, call-center recordings, even buzz on the street.

Stay tuned for this upcoming white paper. The findings promise to be quite exciting!

Finding the Most Accurate Measure of Website Success

This post originally published on 1to1 Media.

For the past decade online marketers have focused on a single metric, almost to the exclusion of all others: conversion. They've implemented costly Web analytics systems, spent hours optimizing the "conversion funnel" to get more people to the shopping cart, and, above all, have focused on getting as many people to complete a purchase as possible. But conversion rates among leading retailers still hover around 2 to 3 percent.

It's time to ditch the idea that conversion is the be-all and end-all of online marketing success. The fact is, not everyone comes to your site looking to buy something. Recent research shows that 84 percent of website visitors are not there to make a purchase; instead, they are looking to obtain information, compare prices, browse products, find out a store location or store hours, get product support, or simply look at pictures and watch videos. That's why the real measure of marketing success is not hard conversion, but task completion. Make no mistake about it: If your site visitors aren't able to complete the tasks they set out to do, they won't consider purchasing from you again, either online or in-store.

Let's look at the numbers. Recently iPerceptions conducted a study of 50,000 online consumers. Just 16 percent of respondents said they visit an e-commerce website with the intention of buying something; the others are there to complete other tasks.

Consequently, every e-commerce site needs to get real feedback from actual visitors to get answers to four essential questions:

What are my visitors at my website to do?
Are they completing what they set out to do?
If not, why not?
How satisfied are my visitors?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, and are spending serious money on technologies and teams to move the dial on your conversion rate, you're making a big mistake. Fundamentally, you are not optimizing your website for the other 84 percent (or 98 percent as is often the case, given a conversion rate of 2 percent) of people who come to your site to do something other than buy things. Find out what they want and then give it to them: information, price comparison, ratings and reviews, store locations, blogs and videos, etc. And then, when they come back to your site a second, third, fourth, or fifth time, continue to give them what they want—until they are finally ready to make a purchase.

The other reason online conversion alone is a poor measure of marketing success is that it doesn't take into account customer satisfaction as a driver of in-store or future purchases. But if you measure task completion, you can know with certainty whether your customers are satisfied—even those who never planned to buy something on your site. Task completion has been proven time and again to be highly predictive of visitor satisfaction.

Satisfied customers who complete their primary tasks buy more, that's a fact borne out by the recent survey responses of 10,000 online customers. Visitors who completed their primary purposes were twice as likely to make a repeat visit, while 67 percent of these "task completers" reported enhanced brand opinion (versus only 18 percent for those who did not complete their intended tasks). Additionally, 60 percent of "task completers" reported a higher future likelihood to purchase either online or offline (versus only 14 percent for those who did not).

Measuring task completion also lets you find out whether the people who are at your site to buy actually do end up buying something—which is a much more valuable metric to have than just knowing how many people end up purchasing an item. In the survey cited above, we found that only half of visitors who go to a site with a distinct intent to buy products end up completing their tasks. That means half of the visitors with a clear intent to buy walk away because sites aren't delivering what they wanted. That's a sobering number.

If you aren't focusing on finding out what tasks your visitors want to accomplish, and then delivering the tools and information they need to complete those tasks, you are missing out on countless sales opportunities. Give conversion a break, and focus on getting your task completion rates above the e-commerce industry average of 68 percent. With tons of satisfied site visitors, those conversion rates will spike after all.

When is task completion the ultimate online survey metric?

(Originally posted at community.4qsurvey.com)

This post is a mini-addendum to last week's 5 reasons post.

Online survey users often ask us to identify when task completion is the most appropriate measure of success for their diverse visitor segments. Is it most appropriate for buyers? Browsers? The truth is that task completion is always a very powerful measure of success, no matter what task a website visitor is seeking to accomplish, but the stats prove that it is an especially powerful predictor of loyalty for first time visitors with very focused patterns of intent.

When we studied the impact of task completion on visitor loyalty, the coefficient of determination rose as visit frequency decreased and tasks got more and more focused. The reasons underpinning this are pretty simple. By virtue of their familiarity with site navigation and overall usability, repeat visitors might have an easier time accomplishing tasks than newbies. At the same time, because they've been their before, they might be slightly more tolerant of visit hurdles than newbies. For newbies, conversely, the reality is different: a lousy first site experience will be an unpardonable offense more often than not.

Visit frequency is the first layer of the progression. The second layer is specificity of task. We've done the math and it shows that task completion explains a very significant proportion of the variation in loyalty scores among visitors seeking to complete very specific tasks. This makes intuitive sense. Imagine a person who visits a website to complete a very specific task--say, to purchase a Dell Inspiron Mini. For that individual, the success of the visit will hinge on whether or not they are able to complete their very focused mission. The answer to that question will weigh heavily in their loyalty calculus. When the task is less focused or specific, however, its importance in the loyalty calculus decreases somewhat. If you've clicked over to Huffington Post and your intent is to browse today's headlines and you're not really looking for any content in specific, the notion of completing a pre-set task doesn't enter as impact-fully into calculations of visit success.

So, when you're looking for that perfect online survey metric, keep your visitor intent segments in mind. Task completion is a powerful metric in all cases, but it's an especially cogent metric for your focused newbies.

Shopping Cart Crimes

(cross posted at community.4qsurvey.com)

In the case of the abandoned shopping cart vs. mankind, we all plead guilty.
We’ve all done it before, both on and offline. We’ve all left her cold and lonely in the middle of an aisle, or simply quit in the middle of an online transaction. Shame on us? Well, not really.

As it turns out, online and offline shopping cart abandonment occurs for pretty much the same reasons- long checkout processes, unclear prices, and insufficient information. The average attention span of an Internet user is about 8 seconds. This makes my 5-year-old son more focused and thus more likely to buy than the average person… bad news for my credit card!

There are so many reasons why we fill up online shopping carts without ever having the intention to purchase in the first place. For most shopping sites, it seems like the only way to add up prices of items, check shipping costs and taxes, or simply compile everything you like in one place is by adding it to the shopping cart. Once you’ve gathered whatever information you were looking for, that’s when you commit your abandonment crime.

For e-commerce websites, it has never been more important to measure intent and task completion. A simple online survey software can help you answer questions about why visitors come to your website and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. These answers will not only provide you with insight to predict future behavior, but will also allow you to pinpoint areas that require change or improvement.

Take 4Qsurvey.com. Our primary goal is the account sign-up (not transactional, but just as well). According to Google Analytics, our conversion rate has fluctuated between 3% and 4%, which would appear as though between 96% and 97% of visitors are “abandoning.” In reality, however, only 15% (on average) of our visitors are onsite to actually create an account. Everyone else is “pre-transactional.” The task completion rate for visitors who are onsite to create an account averages out at 84%. This means that the real conversion abandonment figure stands at only 16%.
Looks like marketers should stop obsessing about completed transactions and start shifting their focus to pre (and post) -transactional behavior.

Five reasons why you need to be measuring visitor task completion

Cross-posted on the 4Q Survey Community

Every single iPerceptions online survey captures visitor task completion. You might wonder why we’re so married to this metric that we feature it in every piece of research we do. Here are five reasons why you need to be measuring visitor task completion and tapping into customer driven optimization:

1) Task completion is THE hard conversion metric for visitors who are not onsite to buy. If you are selling online, survey results consistently show that only 20% of your visitors are onsite with the distinct intent to buy. Sure, you can measure success among this segment using transactional conversion, but what about the others? Task completion quantifies visit success for the other 80%--browsers, researchers, comparison shoppers, price shoppers, blog readers, etc. Task completion measures how effectively you are pushing them down the funnel towards that crucial buying stage.

2) Task completion is a crystal ball into the future. Want to anticipate your visitors’ future online behavior? Measure online task completion. Our survey results show that task completion is a powerful predictor of visit loyalty, brand opinion, and anticipated purchasing behavior--all leading indicators of a customer's long-term commitment to your brand. The crucial finding here is that 60% of visitors who complete their tasks report a higher future likelihood to purchase, versus only 14% for those who do not complete their tasks.

3) Even if you don’t sell online, task completion can function as an extremely powerful predictor of future offline conversion. Data from webValidator online surveys running for durable goods retailers who do not sell online show that visitors who complete their onsite tasks (browsing, researching, viewing visuals, etc.) are significantly more likely to express higher offline purchasing likelihood than visitors who don't complete their primary onsite tasks.

4) Make your ad inventory more attractive and empower your ads sales team with your website task completion data. webValidator survey results reveal that visitors who complete their primary onsite tasks are 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are credible. That's powerful data to have in tow if you want to justify your premium CPMs during a time of collapsing online ad spending.

5) It’s easy to get started with task completion. No complicated formulas, heuristics, or algorithms. No esoteric weighting systems. No specious and conflicting body of "academic" justification. Just a simple “yes” or “no” question that can be collected using a free online survey like 4Q. It’s a metric that holds marketers to account from day one. No hiding behind fuzzy definitions of satisfaction or engagement—instead, task completion is a simple, cut-and-dry barometer of visit success.

Online, Offline, or Non-line Shopping?

Even though the dynamics of shopping have changed in the digital world, marketers are still playing by offline rules. The fact of the matter is, we now live in a non-line world where online and offline behaviors are very much intertwined.

Take my wife, for instance. She might visit the Sephora website to check out their new line of lipsticks, visit the store to try on some colors, and then end up buying online. With this back and forth online/offline behavior, isolating each action and measuring its success individually would not be an accurate indication of the final outcome. Therein also lies the problem of attribution (but we'll save that for another post).

If Sephora’s bottom line is a completed transaction, then it has failed in both the “browsing” and “sampling” phases. The ultimate behavior did, however, lead to a completed transaction, so how would one measure that?

Marketers must look beyond that bottom line and dig into the real reasons why someone visited their website in the first place. If most websites convert at 3%-5%, then what about the remaining 95% who aren’t buying? Who are they, why were they there, and what were they trying to do? This is where intent and task completion can provide real insight. If a visit to Sephora’s website does not result in a completed transaction, it does not necessarily imply a failure. A user’s intent might have been to browse, check prices, or locate a store. Their ability to actually complete these specific tasks is the real measure of success or failure here.

At the store, my wife was pretty much a ghost. Because no transaction took place, no one at Sephora knew who she was, what she wanted, or why she left. This is where the real advantage of having an online presence comes in. A simple online survey can answer all these questions about my wife as a consumer. More importantly, the insight from these answers can uncover strengths, weaknesses, and areas requiring improvement. No store manager can provide you with this information about a customer who just walked out. Each and every customer who walks out of the store without completing their intended task should be considered as an abandoned visitor, and marketers must consider ways to optimize this experience and convert these visitors into buyers. It is time for the offline sites to start playing by the online rules.

Links emerge between task completion and online advertising effectiveness

Cross-posted at the 4Q website survey blog.

In the wake of the depressing ad revenue figures put out last week by the IAB, here's some cheerful news for sellers of online advertising.

Visitors who complete their onsite tasks tend to be far more positively disposed towards the ads that they see. This comes directly from real survey results for media/publishing clients currently running iPerceptions' webValidator Continuous Listening Solution. Our data showed that visitors who completed their primary onsite tasks were 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward in the ads they saw were relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward were credible (see tables). This phenomenon was particularly acute among the valuable yet increasingly scarce segment of visitors in the $100k + annual household income bracket.

Since the relevance and credibility of online advertising units are traditionally two big predictors of clickability and recall, the implications for both buyers and sellers of online advertising are huge. This is a life line to sellers in a time of crumbling CPMs. Sellers now have a clear interest in optimizing their websites to boost task completion, a process that will make their ad inventory that much more salable. On the flip side, ad buyers will need to keep an eye out on publishers' website task completion scores to maximize the ROI of their spend.

Duration of hotel stays declining in the face of recession

An analysis of data for hotel websites running either the free 4Q website survey or the webValidator Continuous Listening solution revealed that hotel stay durations continue to decline in the face of a persistent consumer recession.

Specifically, the total number of nights spent in hotels each year dropped from an average of 18.1 in Q1 2008 to an average of 17.1 in Q1 2009, a fall of 6%. Among business travelers, the average nights fell from 27.2 in Q1 2008 down to 25.3 in Q1 2009, representing a 7% dip

This confirms findings we released in our Q1 2009 Hospitality Industry Report. These latest results are also consistent with recent findings by Harris Interactive on the recession's impact on travel behavior. In the Harris study, 27% of people surveyed indicated that they would decrease the duration of upcoming leisure trips, while 61% of people surveyed confessed that their companies had altered their travel plans in the last 12 months.

In the face of these adverse tides, the margin of error for marketers in the hotel sector decreases exponentially. One piece of advice I can offer: dig into your open-ended survey data and distill those top visitor pain points. Then, take action. As the old adage goes: he who hesitates is lost.

Not selling online? Measure task completion anyway

If you are a retailer who doesn't sell online, you might be asking yourself: "Why should I measure task completion? Isn't satisfaction enough?" Because there is no cut-and-dry "conversion" activity on the website, it's assumed that only softer metrics like satisfaction and engagement will yield useful visitor data.

As it turns out, however, task completion can function as an extremely powerful predictor of future offline conversion. Data from webValidator website surveys running for durable goods retailers who do not sell online (and where the websites are essentially glorified product catalogs) illustrate this point. Visitors who complete their onsite tasks (browsing, researching, viewing visuals, etc.) are significantly more likely to express higher offline purchasing likelihood than visitors who don't complete their primary tasks. The trend is especially pronounced among visitors who are deep into their purchasing cycles (see table).

So, even if you don't sell online, keep an eye on your task completion numbers. As you get better at creating effective and successful visit experiences, you'll drive more people to your store and your bottom lines will growth in a very healthy fashion.

Customer Surveys to Dramatically Boost Conversion

This is a cross post from Practical eCommerce

As much as online retailers focus on driving visitors to the shopping cart, the reality is the majority of consumers don’t visit websites with the clear objective of making a purchase. Study after study done on real survey data has shown that over 80% of visitors to retail and e-commerce websites are not onsite to buy. Instead, they’re onsite to browse, learn, research, comparison shop, check prices, or complete a plethora of other tasks.

So in the quest to boost conversion, maybe it’s time to do something counter-intuitive: stop focusing on the shopping cart. Instead, you need to start figuring out exactly what your visitors are on your site to do, so you can deliver what they want, when they want it, and thereby nudge them down the purchase consideration funnel.

How do you find out what visitors hope to accomplish on your site? Ask them. Simple online surveys, using as little as four quick questions, are the best way to find out the real intent of your customers. No amount of behavioral analysis, click tracking, or user-generated content monitoring is going to deliver the same level of insight as pure voice of customer feedback.

What’s Your Intent?

In today’s economy, when consumers are worried about their jobs, their homes, and their credit, visitors are understandably reluctant to hit the “buy” button. Their buying cycles are longer; whereas, in the past they may have bought on their first visit to your website, now it’s taking two, three, or maybe even four visits to persuade them to part with their hard-earned cash. Using surveys to capture visitor intent will allow you to pinpoint exactly where they are in their decision making process. Are they mystified by your shipping policy? Are they hung up on features and functions? Are they worried they can get your product cheaper elsewhere? By measuring intent, you can deliver the exact information or service visitors are looking for at that time, which means that they will be much more likely to come back to your site or visit one of your stores to complete a purchase.

To clearly understand visitor intent, online retailers really only need to ask visitors one main question: “What is the purpose of your visit today?” You can offer answer choices such as: browse product information, compare prices, look up a store location, get a customer service phone number, or read customer product reviews.

Once you’ve successfully identified visitor intent, you can take it one step further by asking: “Were you or were you not able to complete that task?” and “Tell us why”. These are the main questions used by thousands of online companies who use our free 4Q survey, which takes two minutes to install and starts yielding meaningful insights right away. Or, you can build out a custom survey to ask your customers simple, pointed questions that give you answers to pressing customer engagement and retention questions. For example, you can ask them why they abandoned their shopping carts and you can drill down into reasons for abandonment by product line or demographic segment. What’s more, you can use surveys to ask visitors about their multichannel interactions with your company. Did they visit a store before making their online purchase? Would they prefer to complete their purchase in a local store? Ask them!

Surprising Results

During a recent site redesign, Colin Campbell, founder of Lavish & Lime, a retailer of eco-friendly and natural products, wanted to find out with precision what his customers wanted, so he could build a site that met their needs. The retailer used the free 4Q survey to query visitors about why they came to the site and whether or not they achieved their objectives. When consumers said they were not able to accomplish their goals, the survey asked why. The feedback collected from that one open-ended question helped Campbell understand his customers better than ever before, and to create a new site based on those preferences.

Many of the things people wanted to find out on the site but were unable to were things Campbell never realized were important to his customers. Environmentally-conscious shoppers who came to the site, for example, wanted to find information on the manufacturing principles associated with certain products, such as whether they contained the chemical compound Bisphenol A, or BPA. Lavish & Lime was able to design their new site with these specific customer requests in mind, and already, the new site has achieved impressive conversion results.

Beyond Measuring Conversion

Online retailers get so hung up on conversion that they fail to measure the impact of all the brand interactions that lead up to the buying event. While surveys can do a great job in telling you why buyers abandoned the shopping cart, most of your visitors are not actually onsite to buy. Obsessing about conversion means that you will be turning a dangerously blind eye to all the pre-buying tasks that your visitors are setting out to accomplish.

Rather than making assumptions about why your visitors are onsite, use survey-powered metrics like visitor intent and task completion to find out for sure. Then you can optimize your website for every stage in the buying cycle, from product descriptions all the way through to the shopping cart. There is simply no better way to find out where the purchase process is breaking down, and how to fix it.

Marketing Sherpa documents how Gem Affair used free 4Q survey to lift conversion

Head on over to Marketing Sherpa to read a wonderful case study about Gem Affair's experience with the free 4Q survey. Gem Affair used the insights generated from the free 4Q survey to expand services, improve the website, and increase sales by as much as 4.5% in some categories.

According to the case study, Gem Affair used their 4Q survey data to identify four key online priorities to take action on:

- Adding ring sizing
- Preparing to offer engraving
- Fix JavaScript problems that were slowing load times
- Cancel site navigation overhaul

Gem Affair saw lift in three key areas as a result of taking these steps. First, they were able to boost the overall conversion by a "pretty huge" margin after fixing the website’s JavaScript problem. Second, they saw a 4.5% lift in the sale of rings with the sizing option, compared to rings without sizing, year over year. And finally, their overall customer satisfaction score jumped by 7 percentage points (from 77% to 84%) since they started the survey and began implementing the changes.

Congratulations to Gem Affair on this great 4Q survey success story!

Task Completion: Start Here

I was recently asked by an enterprise client to put something on paper (that he could send to his boss) on the importance of task completion as a base metric for the analytical process.
Why do you guys see it as the (as I often say) prequel to measuring site efficiency?

iPerceptions’ voice of customer solutions begin with a fundamental understanding of visitor intent. To date, conversion has been the most ubiquitous web analytics metric, but it has distorted the analytics picture by assuming that all visitors are onsite to fulfill transactional tasks. This is simply not the case, as a recent analysis showed that over 80% of visitors log onto websites to fulfill non-transactional tasks.

While you have a desired list of outcomes for your website, your visitors have their own distinct set of tasks that they are looking to accomplish. Matching intent to outcomes is the holy grail of online marketing, and measuring visitor task completion will provide you with concrete evidence of how efficiently your site is bridging this divide. Task completion ties back to hard actions taken by visitors and forms the basis of true site accountability. While respondents can be more forgiving when reporting their satisfaction with a website or their loyalty patterns, when they are asked about task completion, it's a cut-and-dry equation--they either completed their tasks or they didn't.

In a time of unprecedented economic upheaval, where growth in all channels—online included—is abating and consumer confidence is sinking, it is crucial to know which metrics link back directly to healthy business outcomes, and which tie directly to behavior. A recent iPerceptions study of over 100,000 respondents to online retail websites demonstrated the significant benefits that task completion improvement can yield to website operators. 67% of visitors who completed their primary tasks reported enhanced brand opinion (vs. only 18% for those who do not). Additionally, 60% of visitors who completed their tasks reported a higher future likelihood to purchase either online or offline (vs. only 14% for those who do not).

By focusing on visitor intent and leveraging iPerceptions’ powerful diagnostic tools and analytical support, you will be tapping into a research approach that has consistently yielded proven online conversion and customer retention uplift, as well as sizable operating cost reductions.

On Google, the newspapers, and measurability

(cross-posted at the 4Q Survey Community Blog)

There's been a lot of chatter in the past week or so about Google and the newspapers. A sampling of the chatter from three excellent writers:

From Nicholas Carr:

"Google's overriding interest is to (a) maximize the amount and velocity of the traffic flowing through the web and (b) ensure that as large a percentage of that traffic as possible goes through its search engine and is exposed to its ads. One of the most important ways it accomplishes that goal is to promote the distribution of as much free content as possible through as many sites as possible on the web. For Google, any concentration of traffic at content sites is anathema; it would represent a shift of power from the middleman to the supplier. Google wants to keep that traffic fragmented. The suppliers of news have precisely the opposite goal."

From Scott Karp:

"The key to Google’s monopoly control over content distribution on the web is its ability to judge what’s most relevant in an increasingly large sea of content.

If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content."

and yesterday from Maureen Dowd:

"Why can’t Google, which likes to see itself as a “Don’t Be Evil” benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?"

What's the underlying malaise here? The fact that Google, as the front door to the web, is diverting news-seeking traffic away from the sites of old media powers either by outright sampling their content or by dispersing the traffic to thousands of smaller sites, including some that have advertising relationships with Google on a PPC basis.

The problem with the discourse thus far is that it's lacking in factuality. None of the polemicists has bothered to measure whether Google is really throttling traffic to the sites of the old media powers.

Let's due the due diligence. Pulling data from Compete.com, here is a year-over-year comparison of the monthly unique visitor counts for the web properties of five hoary old American papers:

The traffic is there; indeed, it's burgeoning. And I would hazard to guess that a huge chunk of this traffic burst is organic, i-e from visitors who key in the URL directly.

So what are they bitching about then?

They're bitching because online ad revenue is shrinking, at a time when the papers desperately need these dollars to stanch the bleeding in their print arms.

It used to be that the papers wielded a near-monopoly on access to prized demographics. If you were Lexus and you wanted to target an ad to a 55 year-old investment banker, you had to take out a full-page ad in the WSJ. Papers made sure that brands knew the composition of their audiences and charged a premium for a sliver of that collective attention. But on the web, the transparency provided by measurability, profiling, and targeting means that brands can reach these audiences on other sites and at vastly lower CPMs. The point is well summed up in a recent Business Week piece:

"For a decade, Web site publishers have relied on an old advertising model: Publishers provided advertisers access to readers, and the more desirable those readers, the more an online publisher could charge. WSJ.com, for example, charges advertisers as much as $64.60 to show a banner ad to 1,000 viewers. (In advertising language, this is called CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.) In the past these fees made sense because The Wall Street Journal's readers are highly affluent, a perfect target for many upscale brands. The better the audience, the more advertisers are willing to pay for ad space.

But what if marketers could find new ways to reach the same audience—with ads on sites that won't charge nearly as much? What if those other ads cost as much as 95% less?"

The papers must make the case that their audiences are among the most highly engaged, whose collective attention is thus worthy of the high CPMs they need to sustain their operations. So far, they've failed to make this case cogently. But don't blame Google for that - blame measurability.

4Q Survey Call for Videos

Got a video camera and some 4Q Survey success stories to share? We want to hear from you (see you). Take 30 seconds and send us your mug! Don't be shy...clearly you can see from the below that to err is human.

My mothers comments: "What's with the beard?"

Follow our Daily Updates on Web-wide Task Completion and Satisfaction Scores

We've recently started reporting daily updates on web-wide task completion and overall satisfaction scores compiled using 10 million datapoints (and growing!) from our free 4Q survey tool. 4Q has been widely adopted across thousands of websites comprising a highly representative cross-section of industries and businesses, so the scores we're releasing can be used both as benchmarks for analyzing your own 4Q survey results, or as a general barometer for the health of the web as a whole. And stay tuned... our publicly available data will soon be even more robust and in-depth.

We're reporting our daily results in a couple of places - first, our 4Q community at http://community.4Qsurvey.com, and secondly, on twitter - just follow @4Qsurvey.

Watch us closely... we've got big plans for our data.

Blogging on the 4Q Community

If things have gone a little bit quiet on Turn up the Silence lately (there's a strange type of pun in there that even I'm not sure I grasp!), it's because we've been blogging about all the 4Q buzz over at the 4Q Community. In the last week or so, we've feature the following posts:

- Marketing Results blogs about successful 4Q survey implementation - a slightly belated write-up about the kind folks @ Marketing Results and their experience implementing 4Q on a series of sites
- How are you using 4Q? - a short dissertation on the value of continuous listening
- iPerceptions' Vendor Pitch at eMetrics Toronto 2009 - we're giving the 4Q Community a look at our 3-minute vendor pitch deck that we'll be unveiling at next week's eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto
- Pod1.com, a Website Agency, uses the 4Q survey to measure Fashion Retailer Customers - Pod1 blogs about their experience with the 4Q survey.

I invite you to head on over the community and check those posts out in full.

Content-rich sites lead the way in task completion and customer satisfaction

As the second half of our 4Q state of the union (click here for the first part), we looked at task completion and customer satisfaction across 20 industry verticals. We found that content-heavy sites are delivering superb value to their visitors, as demonstrated by the fact that Entertainment, Food/Beverage, and Media/Publishing sites placed in the top 3 in both of those metrics. Here are the complete lists:

Vertical-Specific Task Completion (March 2008 - March 2009):

Entertainment 86
Food/Beverage Services 83
Media/Publishing 82
Financial Services 80
Internet Service Providers 78
Health Care 73
Education 72
Computers and Computer Equipment 70
Retail 69
Automotive 69
Marketing 69
Web Analytics 69
Construction 68
Hospitality/Tourism 67
Software Provider 67
Advertising Agencies 65
Electronics 63
Information Technology 63
Telecom 62
Business Services 61

Vertical-Specific Satisfaction (March 2008 - March 2009):

Food/Beverage Services 76
Entertainment 75
Education 71
Retail 71
Media/Publishing 70
Financial Services 70
Internet Service Providers 70
Health Care 70
Advertising Agencies 70
Automotive 69
Construction 68
Hospitality/Tourism 68
Computers and Computer Equipment 67
Business Services 66
Marketing 65
Electronics 64
Web Analytics 63
Software Provider 62
Telecom 62
Information Technology 60

American Websites Falling Behind in Customer Satisfaction and Task Completion

We just completed a detailed analysis of international 4Q survey data since launch (March 2008) for all industry sectors and we found that American websites were lagging behind in the crucial areas of task completion and customer satisfaction. American sites collectively ranked 9th out of 17 industrialized nations in the area of task completion, while they collectively came in second to Canada in customer satisfaction. The full rankings are below.

Regional Task Completion (March 2008 - March 2009):

Norway 83
Sweden 81
Netherlands 80
Canada 78
China 76
Italy 76
Australia 74
India 74
United States of America 74
Germany 71
New Zealand 71
United Kingdom 71
Ireland 64
Brazil 61
Japan 59
France 58
Spain 58

Regional Customer Satisfaction (March 2008 - March 2009):

Canada 72
United States of America 71
Sweden 70
Germany 68
United Kingdom 68
Brazil 68
Netherlands 67
India 67
Italy 66
Australia 66
Ireland 66
New Zealand 65
Norway 64
Spain 61
France 60
Japan 54
China 46

View my page on The 4Q Community

Website Optimization & Visitor Task Completion

Here's the deck we presented as part of last week's installment of the Online Marketing Connect Institute webinar series. The presentation details how you can use powerful metrics like task completion and free tools like 4Q to craft winning user experiences in these tough economic times.

Happy Birthday 4Q!

4Q was launched one year ago yesterday. In only twelve months, she's racked up the following stats:

- Over 2 million respondents
- Thousands of active users
- 9 million + data points
- Adoption in over 100 countries in 16 different languages
- Advanced user segmentation

Way to go, kid! Can't wait to see what you've got planned for your second year!