Doing surveys is an art as much as a science. For example when to show the survey? Do we show it to everyone on the site? What questions to ask? Waht are the priorities of the business?

You cited numerous issues and they are too long for this comment but I plan to blog about them in the coming days.

But the one thing to say is that if at least as step one you keep the focus of the survey narrow and simply to understand why people come to the site, what are they trying to do and were they able to do that. Just three simple questions can reveal so much about customers, way more than most of our KPI’s.

Good to hear from you Yes, I’ve starting reading your interesting posts on Saturday morning with my breakfast and took time to think about what you were talking about.

The least I can say is that you don’t put my mind at rest and pushes me to think harder. Thank you for that.

I totally agree with you that our business is not only summing up a couple of KPIs but also to think in terms of valuable data that is created &/or assembled in order to answer true business questions.

So not only KPIs but also the options you enumerate in your post about qualitative data.
I was doing some research for a client last night following a pitch and a direct URL on a TV commercial and found that this company has some kind of exit survey running.
I was first of all surprised by the available language choice (I was on the website and had already chosen French) and then went on with the survey. Interesting thing is that the survey ran on the surveyers domain thus another domain a my potential client.
Part of the pitch is to patch up WebTrends tagging and log files reports with those type of qualitative data.

From the survey I did last night, theoretically the company should now be able to detect next time I surf on their website from my laptop that I’m a woman, under 35 and living in the Brussels area.
Well, I thruthfully doubt that they will actually be able to match the information using seperate domains and non persistant cookies.

When you talked about the 90/10 issue, I wondered where you’d put all this kind of technological patching up. Could it be part of some kind of process?

Anyhow, related to quantitative data you cited,
- usability is coming in Belgium. We first have to get our clients what they want visitors do do
- follow me homes are going to be too expensive for such a small country like Belgium unless you know of some cheap way
- experimentation/testing oh gosh, you made my heart lift but that’s for another post
- and yes, surveying. Am digging into that one as you can see.

Really liked the Danes.
Talk to you soon,
Aurélie

One important thing is missing from the current KPI mindset. Qualitative Metrics. We have found that clickstream can tell us What but not Why and most top 10 lists of KPI’s can’t be completed without at least two to four qualitative KPI’s that help us understand the why. I touched on this topic in a recent blog post (in the near future I hope to get more specific)…

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/05/overview-importance-of-qualitative-metrics.html

Thanks for a great post and a interesting blog.