Visitor Intent – What’s your guess?

This e-mail was waiting in my inbox bright and early when I came back from vacation last week:

Dear Jonathan,

I love 4Q! I think it’s such an easy way to start the conversation about measuring site effectiveness, and it’s a great way to challenge some dearly-held assumptions at the HIPPO level.

I only have one problem. When I look at my “purposes of visit,” I’m seeing that 70% are selecting other. This has got to be a mistake! I had my user experience team spend two weeks to come up with the list of purposes of visit. There’s no way our brightest minds can’t identify what 7/10ths of our visitors are onsite to do!

Help!

Best,

In Love with 4Q

(Ok, that’s not her real name, but we had to redact it to protect the innocent!)

I was stunned at first. Was 4Q broken? Was there something wrong with the database? First, we checked the technology. Scripts in place across the site? Check. Answer tags rendering properly on the survey screen? Check.

Then, we checked the database. Maybe records were getting deleted by mistake, and the “others” were being over-represented in the reporting tools. So, we watched the responses as they came in, but everything looked sound. Not only were visitors opting to select “other” at an amazing rate, they were actually being quite verbose when asked to write in their exact purposes…and the reality, is that these bright minds on the user experience team who had determined the purpose of visit tags for this particular survey, had no clue why people were coming to the site. They apparently couldn’t even guess.

Understanding visitor intent is critical to establishing site goals. Let me put this another way: if I don’t know why people are on my website, then how can I determine if my site’s doing a good job? I can follow the metrics I think are important, but without the user-sourced data, I’m simply projecting my own biases. And if web analytics has taught us one thing, it’s that the days of assumption and conjecture have passed us by.

To that end, we’ll shortly be taking our own medicine and running a 4Q survey on the 4Q site. And we’ll be transparent enough to tell you if 70% of our visitors reject our pre-define buckets and opt to speak for themselves!

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