A Compilation of Tips for 4Q Suite

For the past 6 months, iPerceptions has been distributing its 4Q Suite Newsletter, which includes a section dedicated to ‘Tips and Tricks’ to improve survey collection and analysis. Below is a compilation of all of the suggestions we have dispensed thus far, with links to the 4Q Support & Community Forum where more detailed explanations can be found.

Manage your survey invitation rate:

Managing your invitation rate is half art and half science. Set your rate too high and you’ll hit your collection limit too early in the month; set it too low and you might not meet your sample needs.

On average, about 1-2% of visitors who receive the invitation go on to complete the survey. If you require 250 respondents per month and you assume a completion rate of 1%, you will need to invite 25,000 people. If your monthly (unique) traffic is 50,000, then you should set your invitation rate at 50% (25,000/50,000).

However, website visitor behavior differs from one site to the next. Lower engagement sites generally have a lower completion rate, whereas sites with a more engaged audience will have a higher completion rate. You will need to monitor your survey for the first few days to see if you’re over or under sampling. Once you’ve established the average completion rate for your site, you should be able to set your invitation rate such that your sample is evenly distributed across the month.

Link to this tip.

Include the email question:

Choosing to include the email question in your survey can provide a fantastic opportunity to build brand loyalty and really connect with your visitors.

There are many changes and suggestions made by your site visitors than can be accomplished in a very short time. From adding a couple of extra links on a landing page that help visitors locate previously hard to find content, to making an action button more obvious, “low hanging fruit” should be a development priority.

Everyone wants to feel like a consultant, and an email check-in when changes are made will help make your visitors feel valued and important; both positive emotions that will be directly associated with you and your site.

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A red upside down triangle:

A red upside down triangle where the online /offline button would normally be (on the My Surveys page) means that you have reached your collection limit for the month. The system automatically stops sending out new survey invitations when the limit is reached, essentially setting the invite rate to 0%.

You can choose to simply wait until the next month rolls around – the collection counter will get reset and you’ll have a fresh quota of survey responses for that month. Or you can choose to upgrade your 4Q Plan and take advantage of the higher collection limits.

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Consider flash heavy pages:

Depending on the website, it is possible that the 4Q Suite invitation may conflict with flash elements on a given page. To avoid these conflicts, visit your survey’s “Publish” section, then click into the “Get Survey Code” subsection.

Ensure the box marked “Flash” is checked off, then grab the updated script from the box on the page and paste this new version of the script onto your website.

Now, when an invitation is served on a page with flash, the flash elements are disabled. When a user responds to the invitation and the invite disappears, the page will reload with the flash elements re-enabled.

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Modify your cookie settings:

Depending on the type of website you have, your surveying needs will vary widely. Sites where content changes more frequently will require visitors to be surveyed more frequently – but perhaps you don’t want to increase your invitation rate.

One option is to reduce the cookie settings on your invitation scripts. Visit the “Get Survey Code” page in the “Publish” section and toggle the “Cookie Expiration” box. You can then modify the cookie expiration length from the 90-day default and survey your visitors more often, without increasing your invitation rate.

Please note, however, that you will need to replace the old scripts on your site with the new, shorter-cookie script. If you change the cookie length but don’t replace the scripts currently on your site, no change will take place.

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Keep your Purpose of Visit choices relevant:

The Purpose of Visit (PoV) question is a great way to identify and profile your website visitors. However, determining which choices to include in your PoV question may take some trial and error.

If one of your current choices is less than 3-4%, consider modifying or replacing it. For hints on what to replace it with, download your datafile and review the answers to your ‘Other, please specify’ choice. Consider those answers that keep getting repeated, but end up “lost” in the aggregation of the ‘Other’ choice.  

It may also make sense to get more granular on broader groupings or to combine smaller groupings into larger ones. For example, if one of your choices is ‘Learn about products and services’ and represents 60% of your traffic, it might make sense to break it into two groupings: ‘Learn about products’ and ‘Learn about services’. Conversely, if ‘Sign up for the weekly newsletter’ and ‘Sign up for the monthly newsletter’ are both at 1-2%, perhaps rolling them up into ‘Sign up for a newsletter’ is the best option.

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Add Satisfaction and Task Completion to your Google Analytics:

Follow these simple steps to create a 4Q-based widget on your Google Analytics dashboard.

1. Click on “Home” in Google Analytics, and then the “+ Add Widget” button.
2. Create a “metric” widget, as opposed to a “pie chart”
3. In the “add a metric” space, select “Avg. Value”
4. Click on “Add a filter”, and in the green “Dimension” box, select “Event Action”
5. In the field following “Exactly matching” write “IPESAT” to display the satisfaction score, or “IPETask” to display the task completion rate. Note that this part is case-sensitive.
6. Name your widget accordingly… i.e. “Satisfaction Score” if you chose to use IPESAT in the previous step.
7. Check out the “Add a Widget” screenshot, located below, for the final product of steps 2-6.
8. Satisfaction scores will display as a number between 0.00 and 10.00, in accordance with the 0-10 satisfaction scale in the survey.
9. Task Completion scores will show as a number between 0.00 and 1.00, and can be referred to as a percentage. In other words, Task Completion of 0.68 can be referred to as 68%.

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Share your success:

You work hard on your business and your website, so why not toot your own horn?

Use the positive feedback from your 4Q Suite survey to help your social marketing campaign by posting choice comments to your Twitter or Facebook accounts.  Just add “via @4qsurvey” at the end of your tweets to help identify that your tweet comes from your users, and let the positive feedback you receive contribute to the betterment of your brand.

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Use 4Q Suite with your A/B testing:

A+B testing is a powerful web optimization tool, where two versions of the same page, feature or site are run in parallel with the most successful alternative being selected.

Include 4Q Suite in your A+B testing program by creating a second identical survey within your account. Each survey will have its own invitation script, and you’ll have data for each option kept in separate and secure databases. Use Satisfaction and Task Completion scores, along with data from providers like Google Analytics, to help you choose the winner.

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Every month, we provide additional tips and tricks in our 4Q Suite Newsletter. Sign up for the 4Q Shite Newsletter for fresh tips, along with new product announcements, limited-time promotions, upcoming webinars, industry events, and more.