Task Completion: A Simple Yet Beautiful Metric
You’ve heard us preaching in this space about the value of knowing satisfaction. I’m going to take a different track today and explain why we’ve made task completion the lynchpin metric of our new 4Q initiative. While task completion will never displace its big brother, satisfaction, it can be just as powerful a metric for websites where success is cut and dry, and here I’m making specific reference to transactional and lead generation sites.
These kinds of sites are not destinations. They are not like Facebook, MySpace, recently acquired Bebo, or any other of the burgeoning Web 2.0 communities. Visitors are not onsite for the heady sense of self-casting that Web 2.0 purveys; rather, they have come with the intent of doing something. They have taken time out of their busy days for very specific reasons, and they are undertaking very precise tasks. The most critical challenge as a site owner in such a situation is shepherding people to the completion of these tasks. If websites are to be held accountable as mature interactive channels, then this maxim must ring true.
If visitors’ tasks are not complete, it is of little value if they are left feeling engaged or if the site managed to monopolize a sizable chunk of their time. For these sites to operate at optimal efficiency, buyers must be buying, support seekers must be obtaining support, content creators must be creating, and learners must be learning. We are in the business of disabusing site owners who think they are doing well enough because they have impressive page views, time on site, visitor recency, or self-reported loyalty scores, but have made no effort to measure their task completion rates. Every other metric, whether behavioral or attitudinal, can be explained away, contradicted, and, ultimately, discarded in the end. But task completion remains the sole incontrovertible lifeblood of a successful website.
This is not just a marketing spin; it is a contention based on a solid bedrock of evidentiary truth. Consider the following results, taken from our automotive industry database and covering the period from June 2007 to January 2008, inclusive. We found that task completion was a tremendously strong ROI predictor among visitors with a purchase horizon of 3 months or less—even stronger than overall site satisfaction. Close to 70% of respondents who completed their onsite tasks also expressed an increased likelihood to purchase a vehicle further to their website visit. This share fell to 63% among visitors who reported that their overall site satisfaction was “Good” or better. These findings stem from a dataset of more than 15,000 respondents; therefore, the sampling error is negligible.
Task completion is a sensible, simple, and powerful metric. Most importantly, it ties back to hard actions taken by visitors. While respondents can be more forgiving when reporting their satisfaction with a website or their loyalty patterns, often opting to cling to a safe, noncommittal response, when they are asked about task completion, it’s a cut and dry equation—they either did or they didn’t. If I walked into a Wal-Mart with a list of 7 items, I either successfully obtained these items, or I didn’t. It’s a black and white dichotomy; the time I took, the items I perused, or my overall happiness with the experience are, in my opinion, variables of far lesser impact.
Real site accountability comes from a commitment to maximizing task completion. The image that is mirrored back to you might not always be pretty, but at least it will be truthful. This is why, in conjunction with Avinash, we have made task completion the lynchpin metric of 4Q. We are convinced that it is far more powerful than other vague metrics peddled by dilatory vendors, which are engineered more to soothe and extenuate than to drive optimization and improvement.
