Thanksgiving results show online retailers don’t have to just sit and wait…

by Lane Cochrane and Noran El-Shinnawy

Online retail breathed a collective sigh of relief once this year’s Thanksgiving results were in. The general consensus is that online traffic was up and, more importantly, sales were up relative to last year. Many are trying to figure out the implications to the overall consumer predisposition to buy this holiday season, and based on what has fuelled the online channel so far, web practitioners have reason to continue working right up until the end.

Unlike others waiting in traditional channels, searching desperately for signs of consumer willingness to spend this holiday season, online retailers can influence the outcome to a much greater extent.

So what did Thanksgiving reveal?

First off, that more consumers than ever before came with the intent to buy, not just to browse or collect information, a clear reflection of increased confidence in online purchasing. Whether or not this confidence continues to grow for the remainder of the year, this greater interest in buying online is enough to drive channel success. The effort to ease security concerns, solve shipping issues, and pitch the convenience had direct bottom line benefits that will continue well beyond the holidays.

Second - and this is where practitioners can take some credit - when we look at those coming to websites with the intention to buy, the percentage that actually managed to do so has increased. Yes, task completion for buyers is up and this exactly is the result we are looking for.

You may or may not see this trend by just looking at your conversion rate. You could end up with more browsers and shoppers (lookout in 2010 to turn these folks in to buyers) but among those who came with the intention to buy, more were able to actually do so. What this tells us, is that businesses are figuring out the right blend of price, product, and usability to better optimize the user experience and their likelihood to finish on the right note – for both them and you!

Availability and price will always rank high in the reasons for abandonment, but reasons associated with usability are the low hanging fruit. Data from our 4Q Survey tool reveals that website issues such as inadequate descriptions, awkward procedures, navigation problems, or technical difficulties account for about 25% of why people failed to make a purchase. The good news is that many of these are quick fixes- digging into our open-ended responses, we found that some clients were unable to make a purchase because they couldn’t find a sizing chart on the website. So something so simple in the right spot at the right time can make or break it for thousands.

More big weeks of the holiday season are upon us, and prospects online based on Thanksgiving results should be good. While everyone waits outside their real or virtual doors to see if consumers are willing to continue shopping this year, those working on the details will continue to push the success of the channel beyond the results of the overall holiday sales trend. With high traffic comes high opportunity for feedback, so make sure you stay on top of it by continuously listening and appropriately responding.

iPerceptions + WASP: my take

By Stéphane Hamel

I'm really proud and happy to announce iPerceptions has acquired the WASP product line and technology. You can read the official press release, but I also wanted to share some personal thoughts about what it means for me and for the 11,000 WASP users around the world.

Three years in the making

When I started working on WASP, around November of 2006, I was a part-time web analytics practitioner trying to solve, or at least simplify a real issue: how to check if our web analytics implementation was done correctly. I already had several years of experience implementating web analytics tools and knew how complex it was. What started as a proof of concept quickly became an interesting side project. One thing leading to another, a public beta was announced and in January 2009, a commercial product.

An unfulfilled need

Cookie deletion rate is a recurring topic; is it 3%, maybe 10%? It simply amazes me! The primary cause of poor analytics data isn't cookies, it's bad implementation... While you don't have much control over cookie deletion rate, you do have control over the site instrumentation (or you should!). In a study recently commissioned by Google (full PDF report), Forrester revealed the most important consideration factor for choosing a web analytics solution is "reliable data collection" (45%!). Yet, vendors generally do a very poor job at offering quality assurance tools.

Word of mouth kicked in, user base grew to over 11,000 worldwide, 150 tools detection and a market predicted by Forrester to grow 17% for the next several years. Feedback, feature requests and constructive comments helped gradually tweak the product. There is still a long list of ideas and things to do, and as the market evolve, so will WASP. Alternatives are either too complex, unpractical, or too expensive. Clearly, WASP is answering a need: I have never seen a perfect implementation!

Always be learning

WASP has been an amazing learning experience. As most of you know, I did everything on my own, from development to marketing, commercialization and support. However, I was at a crossroad: do I want to become a product vendor, hire a bunch of people and grow the business, or remain true to the core reason why I wanted to become a freelance. I've been a strong advocate of web analytics, I love teaching & speaking at conferences (hear me at Infopresse in Montreal this Thursday, and at eMetrics Washington D.C. next week!) and my interests are for research & education. WASP is why I won the WAALTER award, and certainly a strong factor behind my election to the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors. I have other projects I want pursue; the Web Analytics Maturity Model, the concept of Just In Time Tagging and other crazy ideas to make web analytics easier.

My future and the future of WASP at iPerceptions

"Why iPerceptions?" you might ask. There were other offers, but iPerceptions is best positioned to bring WASP to the next level while remaining true to its original spirit: free trial, single user entry-base product up to enterprise level capabilities; wide range of products detection; closely listening to the Voice of Customer. They can bring the expertise and manpower I couldn't.

The popularity of 4Q Online Survey also demonstrates their ability to bring innovative solutions to the market. As an independent thought leader and member of the iPerceptions Advisory Council, I will stay closely involved and help them with new and interesting applications that I'm sure will have profound implications for the analytics community.

Parting thoughts

Thanks to my "angel advisers" (you know who you are!) for your insights & recommendations. Your willingness to help is always deeply appreciated and I'm trying to "pay it forward" whenever I can. Thanks to you: web analysts, vendors, fellow bloggers and users of WASP!

I will keep an eye on WASP and help iPerceptions the best I can. In the meantime, and as always, I'm happy to hear your feedback!

Everything New is Old Again

By Christopher Pam and Dany Di Tullio

EvE Online is space-based massively multiplayer online game, or “MMO” as the industry jargon goes. Ever year, the CCP team (EvE’s developers) produce 2 free expansions for their game, chock full of new features, items and ships to be bought, sold, flown, traded and destroyed. While the player base appreciates all the shiny goodness that comes around expansion time, they grudgingly acknowledge that with awesome new toys comes an army of bugs.

While a game like EvE Online (with over 600,000 lines of code) may be a more complicated animal than a website, the general principal remains the same: big releases generally have big bugs. In order to counteract this common ailment, web developers typically work extensive testing into their development schedule prior to releasing their updates to the live servers. Testing takes man-hours, and the fewer people you have testing and debugging, the longer the process takes.

Working backwards, lets assume that WIDGET inc. has a major release going live in December. With a December launch date, that probably means they have been testing and debugging for a couple of months (September or October). When you factor in programming time, this may mean that “feature freeze” was in July or August. WIDGET inc. is leveraging intelligence gained from their clickstream and survey data, which naturally predates their feature freeze. Their reports are based on data gathered from April, May and June. Phrased another way, their “New December Release” is based on data that is 6-9 months old.

In the offline world, 9 months is the time it takes to create a new human. In the online world, 9 months is an eternity. Moore’s Law states that computing power (CPU transistor count) doubles every two years… 9 months is a long time! What may have been innovative this week has become standard by next month. YouTube, social networking sites, RSS feeds, blogs, 24-hour news networks (and their websites); all focus on distributing information as widely as possible, as quickly as possible. Once “nugget A” is sent out, the focus is on “nugget B”. People no longer care about “what is”… they care about “what’s next”.

So often I hear the criticism from clients that Voice of Customer data doesn’t change month over month. But the question I have (which I typically don’t verbalize) is: “why would you expect it to?”. If your company follows the long development process illustrated above, websites are essentially stagnant. Why would you expect metrics to be any different?

The ability of a website to improve and satisfy their customers is directly tied to their development cycle. More and more companies are adopting a micro-release philosophy, using customer feedback data to make their sites incrementally better. Micro-releases may contain a couple of minor changes, but sometimes a little goes a long way. Smaller changes mean less time debugging, testing and require less programming time overall. Not to mention fewer man hours; a positive for companies where the web team is either understaffed or overworked.

This is akin to the proven open source software development approach: “release early, release often”. Most open source projects are an ever changing, ever morphing response to the constant customer input that this approach brings. The tightening of the feedback loop is a substantial benefit here that can also be leveraged in a website redesign context. For instance, you will quickly know if you misinterpreted something and are going down the wrong path which allows you to fix these issues with minimal time loss.

Shortening the development cycle by adopting a micro-release philosophy allows webmasters to meet the needs of visitors while keeping the site relevant. Patches can easily be released, and websites are better suited to adjust to what is the current “flavour of the month”. The quest for the “best” website becomes a series of steps, as opposed to a giant (and sometimes blind) leap. Websites are no longer optimized for “9 months ago”; they are optimized for 2-4 weeks ago. Not ideal… but significantly better than the alternative.

Listening mechanisms like Voice of Customer surveys and clickstream data are tools that provide real-time feedback, and they are tools that are too often left in the toolbox. Website administrators need to shorten development cycles and leverage these tools to ensure that their visitors are satisfied. They otherwise run the risk their shiny new website be “old news” before it even launches.

If You Want to Truly Understand Something...

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. ~Kurt Lewin

Changing the website is a big venture for our clients – and expectations on the outcome are always high. Eyes often turn to their voice of customer surveys to track the outcome. The initial results can be hard to take.

Consistently we notice a dip, often fairly significant, in how the users rate the website during and after the change. While no two changes are the same, the dip and subsequent recovery are very consistent phenomena. It does not happen every time, but all too often it does. Clients have usually established aggressive goals about the user experience because of the change and this dip disappoints them. They may question the change or worse question the ability of consumers to know what is good for them.

Here’s the confusion. While the ratings of the site drop, when we ask how visitors who have been to the site prior view the change, the majority will say it has improved! Searching through the open end comments visitors provide in their survey feedback, we often see the same outcome. The number of positive comments about the change often trumps the number of negative. But still the ratings will drop.

People like change, just not the details of the change. It’s like asking someone if the new house they bought is better. Of course it is – but they may also complain endlessly about all the issues associated with moving in, and what’s missing, and how hard this or that is to find. Same for your site visitors. While their objective mind may acknowledge that your site change likely offers improved benefits long term, their immediate experience is frustrating due to navigation issues, the unavoidable bugs, or the unexpected consequences the best of plans may have overlooked.

Designers should focus on beating the recovery curve – bouncing back to higher levels of experience as quickly as they can. Browsing the spike in buzz about the change offers some ideas for immediate fixes to try and beat this curve. Some simple insight on display issues or functional problems can reveal themselves within the comments. Making management aware of the potential for an early dip and focusing on beating the curve will focus teams on the right issues and keep internal teams positive.

Lane Cochrane, VP Professional Services

Follow Noran El-Shinnaway at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver

Noran will be tweeting from the show. She's been an energetic contributor to the 4Q Survey Community since joining the iPerceptions team two months, so expect some punchy and insightful observations as she soaks up the vibe at the Internet Marketing Conference. The show runs from September 16-18, 2009 and features a keynote address from the inimitable Avinash Kaushik.

You can track all the buzz using the hashtag #imcmeet or follow Noran's dispatches using the handy app below.

Take Your Canary Down the Opinion Mine

Nowadays, social media and blogs have never had a stronger impact on products, businesses, and even individuals. Moving in this direction, it is becoming increasingly insufficient to only dig into quantitative data for insight. A growing trend is currently shifting towards sentiment analysis, accounting more for opinions and emotions.

I may not be entirely exaggerating when I say that something like Twitter is capable of making or breaking a brand, as people are now starting to refer to these social mediums for data. Had I read through Tweets about the movie Funny People before seeing it a few weeks ago, I probably would have made a different choice. These days, companies have very little choice but to dig into these sentiments and rethink their marketing and PR strategies to respond accordingly.

There is no doubt that today’s tools are able to provide us with a more complete framework that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data. But the degree of accuracy and sophistication of these tools are questionable when it comes to their qualitative aspect. Most available sentiment analysis tools operate by 2 simple steps- scanning then categorization. Digging into open ended results, they are able to search for specific words then categorize them as either positive or negative. As simply put by Alex Wright of the New York Times, Love is good, Hate is bad.

With this data scanned and categorized, you can compare your positives and negatives to get a general picture of your brand perception. Unfortunately, people like me can really mess up your data. While these linguistic tools perform simple binary analysis, they fail to capture idiomatic aspects like humor, irony, and sarcasm. I recently Tweeted about the movie: “Funny People, not so funny”. Will this be categorized as a negative because of “not” or positive because of “so funny”? How about if I said that the new BlackBerry is “sick”? Can the tool detect the difference between that and saying that it makes me sick? This is where these automated tools can fall short.

At this point in time, we must accept that these tools will not provide us with the 100% accuracy that we seek. The only available tools with this sort of accuracy, in my opinion, are humans. For the mere purpose of positivity, let’s just say that a bit of accuracy is always better than none. So if we consider ourselves miners, let’s think of these tools as our canary birds. We can take them down the opinion mines with us, but let’s not put our full dependence on them just yet.

Better Shipping, Better Shopping

In our recent blog post about shopping cart crimes, we touched on the issue of shopping cart abandonment as a main problem for e-commerce websites. In hopes of rectifying this matter, online retailers are shifting their focus to the checkout process by being more accurate and transparent with their shipping costs and policies.

Last month, Forrester Research released "The State of Retailing Online 2009: Merchandising Report,” where it surveyed 117 online retailers. Results revealed that 79% of the respondents have made it their number one priority for the remainder of 2009 to improve the checkout process on their websites. With the current economic slump, consumers are becoming increasingly price sensitive. With that in mind, the report explains how retailers believe that it is particularly important for consumers to understand shipping charges at the beginning of the checkout process, making them less likely to abandon their purchase.

In our soon to be released Q2 2009 Retail/E-Commerce Industry Report, we examined data collected from iPerceptions survey respondents to determine barriers to buying or task completion. The barriers were coded into 10 different categories, with the top 4 being:

1. Didn’t find what I was looking for
2. Price-related
3. Navigation/usability
4. Shipping policy

When compared to the initiatives being taken by online retailers as revealed by the Forrester report, it seems like their efforts are being directed towards reducing these barriers. To overcome the first barrier of search problems and help consumers find what they are looking, the report reveals that 73% of the surveyed retailers are planning on adding filters and search functions to their websites. On top of that, 41% are considering the introduction of entirely new search engines. Not only will this help customers find what they are looking for, it may possibly help reduce the third barrier of navigation and usability, making the sites more user friendly for consumers.

To overcome the second barrier to purchase pertaining to price, the report reveals that 89% of the surveyed retailers are working on the introduction of sale or clearance pages to their sites in the upcoming months, an effort directed towards better accommodating price sensitive consumers.

Last but not least, the focus of the report revolves mainly around the improvement of the checkout process for online retail website. Of the 117 surveyed retailers, 88% believe that a better checkout process will lead to less likely shopping cart abandonment. Consequently, they are planning on improving that process by providing more information and being more transparent about their shipping cost and policies.

Whereas we are unable to predict the exact effect that these efforts will have on the aforementioned barriers, it is evident that they are specifically designed to address them. Whether or not online retailers will be able to overcome these barriers is something we are hoping to see in the results of our Q3 E-Commerce Industry Report.

Task Completion and Consumer Confidence

In many of our previous pieces, we touched on the power of task completion as both a predictive metric and the ultimate source of business intelligence in today’s challenging web environment. But is there also a case for task completion as a high-level indicator of overall economic health?

In the wake of last fall’s economic panic, it was inevitable that we would watch task completion dip very sharply. As the economic downturn worsened and unemployment rates rose, consumers became and remained generally pessimistic about overall business conditions. Recently, however, there has been a sharp uptick in task completion, indicating that consumer behavior is getting back to a more salutary state.

Online purchases and transactions are strong indicative signs of renewed optimism on the part of consumers. As overall pessimism about the short term outlook begins to slowly diminish, consumers begin to gain more confidence about the economic recovery, which is then reflected in their purchasing behavior. It's a virtuous feedback loop, where higher visit success reinforces confidence, which then in turn helps to overcome barriers to online purchasing.

The increase in task completion that we've observed over the past two quarters is now being duplicated in the form of a rebound in consumer confidence. Metadata from our 4Q online survey tool reveals task completion and overall satisfaction for the retail and e-commerce sectors have increased proportionally with consumer confidence. Since February 2009, task completion and overall satisfaction results from website running the 4Q online survey have risen from 71% to 78% and from 71 to 74, respectively. At the same time, data from The Conference Board shows a surge in the consumer confidence index since the late spring.

That strong relationship between these two metrics is no mere coincidence. Task completion and consumer confidence are intimately connected. It is only one reason why you should constantly be keeping an eye on your task completion score, especially if you are retailing online.

Invitation on arrival: the rationale

(Originally posted on the 4Q survey community)

Why do we intercept visitors only on arrival to a website? Why is this method the only sampling option available for the 4Q online survey? Why not intercept visitors once they've clicked deeper into the site architecture--in other words, why not intercept visitors who are more loyal, more engaged?

Sound random sampling, within the context of an online survey, requires that everyone in a population (the population in this case is the total number of visitors to your site) has an equal probability of being selected. Those that spend more time on a website or visit more pages are almost unquestionably different from those that spend less time on websites or visit fewer pages. Yes, they may be your brand champions, yes they may be highly engaged, and yes it might flatter your professional ego to hear them declaim about their love for your brand, but, ultimately, a sample biased towards them will not be representative of your site population at large--it will not include all-important feedback from your bounces, your drive-by traffic, etc. Chances are, feedback from the latter group will be less positive, but it will be chock-full of low hanging fixes you can make to migrate these people from drive-by status to engaged status.

To get at that representative cross-section of your visitors base--in all its diverse, multifaceted glory--we need probability theory to be working on our side. Directional data from your highly-engaged, high-pages viewed segments certainly has a role to play, but representative sampling observations start with giving every visitor a chance to speak his/her mind, and that means we have to randomly invite 4Q online survey respondents at the only gate that everyone passes through--the front door.

After four wonderful years working at iPerceptions...

After four wonderful years working at iPerceptions, I have made the very difficult decision to move on (this coming Friday will be my last day). A personal one, and a decision that I have spent a great deal of time marinating on….in the end though one that obviously feels bitter / sweet.

I joined iPerceptions back in mid 2005. At the time, I had spent the prior 10 years or so building round one (Web 1.0 – hate the term) of the Internet. My career started in 1996 where I built one of the first vertically integrated web development shops in Canada (eventually sold to a larger competitor and went to work with them). It was a time when companies knew they needed an online presence they just had no idea why. The upper hand came from having a strong understanding of how brands could leverage this new digital platform. It was all about strategy. My focus then was on two things; community, and audience / site measurement. This was our niche. When I met the team at iPerceptions, it was a natural fit. I was drawn to the ‘voice of customer’ space. Things were quite different then, both with the company, and the web analytics industry in general. The timing however was perfect, and the past four years have been incredibly empowering.

For starters, iPerceptions has quintupled (5x) in staff over the past four years. Today, iPerceptions has offices in Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, New York and London. Growth spurt is an understatement. 



When I joined the company, I came in wearing a ‘senior account exec’ hat. Back then, voice of customer solutions were very much a ‘missionary sale’. People didn’t know what to do with our data, let alone know where we fit inside their organization.

Today, progressive companies embrace voice of customer at the highest strategic levels. Marketing and research teams are being re-organized to analyze and interpret customer feedback as a primary data source. Organizations are hiring experts in customer insight, and entire departments are being devoted to the customer experience. A real paradigm shift.

In 2005, the Web Analytics Association ‘discouraged’ our membership application, as the industry didn’t recognize what we did as web analytics practice.

Today, the Web Analytics Association is growing leaps and bounds with VoC professionals and sponsors who have helped to bring customer experience and feedback to the forefront of the industry. The site is even running our 4Q Website Survey as a way to capture visitor experience data on their own website.

When I first joined the company, we had one main competitor with whom we fought for most of this emerging market. Today, there are handfuls of good voice of customer providers, each with their own set of strengths and unique value propositions. 

Back then, the only sentiment / attitudinal based metric people cared about (those who knew they needed something more than clicks and path) was ‘satisfaction’.

Today, more and more progressive companies understand the need for other, more telling outcomes (intent, task completion, next steps, referral etc).

So much has changed around us in this industry, that I could probably write forever…but I have new challenges to take on (both personal and professional). All this change does one thing for sure, it begs the question of what changes lie ahead. One thing for certain, change is a foot. 


I have watched and personally contributed to the growth of this industry. It has been truly amazing to work with some of the people and brands that iPerceptions has allowed for.

If I look back over the past 15 years of my career in the web industry, it truly has been a natural evolution of both the internet as a channel for customer empowerment, and my own professional development as a digital marketer.

We will look back in a hundred years at the past 15, and we will realize that it represents a very small blip in the overall paradigm shift. I fundamentally believe that we are only just beginning to define what the web means, and I am excited for what comes next.

As for me, I’m off to do my ‘stupid passion thing’. 
I will still be working with the team at iPerceptions, and not swaying too far from the web analytics industry. 


I’ve had the pleasure of working with some really great people and brands over the past four years. Let’s make sure to stay in touch:

Twitter | LinkedIn | FriendFeed | Facebook

Jonathan Levitt

The best things in life are free

Sam Cooke once said that the best things in life are free- the flowers in spring, the robins that sing, and free analytics software… okay, maybe not that last one.

The 2009 Online Measurement and Strategy Report is out and it reveals interesting trends such as growing trend in improving customer acquisition through web analytics. More interestingly, it shows a growing trend in the number of companies using Google Analytics.

While the immediate temptation is to assume that just because it’s a free application, people are only using it haphazardly, for ad-hoc exercises, analysis by Bryan Eisenberg shows that there is a shift from spending on technology to spending on staff. While the web analytics applications might be free, the investment is in the analysts and staff who are making sense of this data. In today’s economy, this seems to make a lot of sense.

On top of that, our own 4Q online survey metadata suggests that free web analytics application users are very highly engaged with the tools that they use. For example, even though the 4Q online survey is a little under 16 months old, over 40% of account holders have had their surveys in field, live and collecting, for at least 100 days.

Furthermore, we know from our own use of Google Analytics (we’re highly engaged ourselves!) that traffic to the pages that host our 4Q online reporting tools has never been higher. We’re seeing active users who are passionate about the data they collect and passionate about the results that emerge from that data.

While that may not be as enticing as spring flowers or full-throated robins, it’s pretty formidable for a free tool!

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.