OX2 Web Analytics blog

When you launch a new website, you usually expect it to answer relevant questions such as « Are my visitors qualified? », “Do my visitors find what they are looking for?”, “Do they come back to my site?” “Do they go where I want them to go?” and so on.

Web Analytics help you answer these questions and are undeniably very useful when you analyze your site’s efficiency and efficacy. But Web Analytics are about quantitative data and we also need qualitative data in order to refine our analysis. Indeed, knowing what visitors do on your website is one thing and knowing why they do it is another one. We can of course make many hypotheses based on WA data and on common sense but how many times did you wonder why some visitors behaved so weirdly?

Instead of carrying on with mere assumptions, why not ask them directly?

There are several companies offering customer satisfaction and exit visitor surveys but in today’s post, I will focus on 4Q.

4Q is a free and simple website survey solution, the result from a collaboration between Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions.

4Q, currently only available in English, focuses on the 4 most important survey questions:

1. How satisfied are my visitors?
2. What are my visitors at my website to do?
3. Are they completing what they set out to do?
4. What are they saying in the open-ended commentary?

4Q gives you the choice in the answers’s propositions and it depends on your site’s business.
Integrating this survey into the website is quick and simple: all you have to do is create an account on http://4q.iperceptions.com/, then integrate 3 lines of code into the homepage’s (or other landing page’s) HTML code and then choose the participation rate.
4Q gives real-time and complete access to the results once the code is integrated into the page’s HTML code.

Once your visitor is on your website, your page turns into a message box (see below). He or she decides to participle or not and if so, another window opens with the beginning of the survey:

Please note that this kind of method is quite intrusive and may disturb your visitors.

The results are presented in 3 different categories and we can break down the results in different periods via the drilldown menu: last 6 months, last 8 weeks, last 7 days.

To take a look at the answers at the open-ended commentary, all you have to do is to click on the percentages (see below).

In addition to the intrusive nature of the survey, another negative point concerns the impossibility to modify it after it was created but the iPerceptions Team is currently working on it.

There is also a good support service via the forum where we can share our experiences, make suggestions and where the team iPerceptions keeps us abreast of the latest advances in the survey options and answers all our questions.

We can also contact them directly if we don’t find any answer in the FAQ section or if we don’t want to use the forum.

Note that if you want a customized poll with more questions, iPerceptions offers this service but it won’t be free anymore.

In conclusion, this tool -basic and simple- can be useful in analyzing visitor behavior and perfectly complements WA basic tools.