iPerceptions : web analytics, attitudinal predictive customer feedback
Turn Up The Silence
Jan 08

US Lags UK, Asia in Visitor Task Completion

Results for Q4 2008 for retail websites running 4Q surveys revealed that American sites trailed their counterparts in the United Kingdom and Asia in the crucial area of visitor task completion (see the chart below). US sites also trailed their Asian counterparts in terms of task completion among buyers, and they fell well below the impressive 84% task completion rate for buyers in the Eurozone. 47% of visitors to US retail sites who came onsite ready to buy, wallet in hand, walked away without fully accomplishing that task. That could mean spending less than anticipated or even abandoning the digital shopping cart altogether.

We sounded the alarm bell on this back in November, when we released data showing that task completion among self-identified buyers visiting US websites was trending at a dismal 52%.

This consumer recession, which is even putting a dent into giant merchants like Wal-Mart, is going to be the defining challenge for this generation of digital marketers. Unless sites avail themselves of powerful optimization tools to fix leaky funnels, they will simply disappear. Clearly, sites in the Eurozone are ahead of their American counterparts on this one.

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Michael Whitehouse
January 08, 2009
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Comments

I think this release would be more hard hitting if a few things were included:

- Sample size and confidence interval
- Nature of the tasks attempted
- Types of sites visited

Perhaps the UK does more online banking? Maybe the US does more "brochure" sites? Perhaps Asia has a more limited amount of accessible sites (e.g. China)?

Another thing to compare against would be visitor satisfaction. There could be a disconnect between completion and satisfaction. Perhaps despite a lower completion rate, visitors are generally satisfied - then would it be worth the extra effort to get a higher completion rate.

Just ideas.

Rommil Santiago
January 09, 2009

Hi Rommil,

Thanks very much for your comment. The sites included in this analysis were retail and e-commerce ones; in essence, merchants, whose sites had a transactional component. The nature of the tasks attempted varied slightly from region to region, but some of the recurring ones were: buying, browsing/comparing products, price shopping, learning about technology, and customer service requests.

Also, FYI, the "aggregate" sample sizes for each region were as follows:

US: 13,500 respondents
UK: 12,600 respondents
Asia: 12,000 respondents
Eurozone: 1,200

Admittedly, the sample size for the Eurozone was a little lighter than we'd have liked, but we tested the gaps and they were still significant.

Thanks!

Michael Whitehouse
January 12, 2009