Answering Avinash: is Time on Site a useful metric?

I'm currently reading Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. It's an amazing book and I'm learning more and more every time I read a bit more.

But there is one thing I don't agree with: Avinash argues in chapter 3 that Time on Site is a very important and useful metric. Here is why I think Time on Site is not a good metric.

First of all a question: is it better when people spend more time on your site? Yes?
Let's put this in another way: Do you have a better website then your competitor if people spend more time on your site then on the competitor's site? The answer seems so obvious: of course it is better – more time means that visitors are happier with what they see. It means more 'engagement with your brand', like marketers would say. We all have very little time, so spending more time on a site must be better.

We could consider this as our basic hypothesis: 'more time on site = a better site'.

Not that good a site?

This also seems to be the general opinion when I talk to people from agencies and clients who work in on-line marketing: Time on Site is an important metric. And everybody seems to say: more time on site is better; we should take action to increase the time on site.

Let's try and test our hypothesis.

We all know one obvious example where more Time on Site isn't better: Google's search engine has a very clear strategy to decrease the Time on Site. Google understands that people come to their site and they want to find what they're looking for ASAP. Google optimizes it's search engine to reduce every microsecond possible and to ship every visit in the shortest time possible to one of the search results. They optimize their algorithm, and implement Google Suggest and Google Instant so we can search faster and leave their page quicker.

So if the success of Google is defined by the idea that more time on site isn't necessarily better, maybe we need to rethink this a bit?

Let us have a look at this example: imagine these 4 visits who come to my e-commerce site.

Visitor 1 comes to my e-commerce site to choose and buy a product. He finds the info he needs and buys the product he likes. He stays 5' on my site and is very happy with his visit.

Visitor 2 comes to my site to see where his order is, since it wasn't delivered on time and he hasn't heard anything yet. Visitor 2 comes to the site, tries to find a 'track order' section or function, doesn't find it, tries to log in but doesn't recall his password. He gets lost in the 'recover password' procedure. His only other options is calling an expensive 902 customer-care number and he gives up after a while. Visitor 2 stays 8' on the site and leaves frustrated and angry.

Visitor 3 doesn't like buying on-line, and wants to talk directly to a rep about some technical issues of your product. He comes to the site, locates easily the 'contact' function and gets a toll-free number in no-time. He stays 2' on the site and is very satisfied about the info the sales-persons gives him on the phone.

Visitor 4 comes to your site after clicking on a banner ad with a promotion. He doesn't see the promotion on the landing page. He's a good sport, so he clicks on a 'promotions' button, but this link is broken and he gets to see a 404 error-page. Visitor 4 stays just 1' on your site and needless to say, he's not a satisfied customer.

So we have an average Time on Site of 4'.

Visitor 1 stayed 25% more time than average on your site, which seems to confirm that people spending more time on site are happier and that it is 'better for your brand'.

Visitor 2 stayed double as average on your site and had an awful experience. This makes us question the hypothesis that a longer visit is a better visit.

Visitor 3 was happy, but stayed just half of the average time. So maybe we have to turn around our hypothesis. Maybe it's not true that 'more time = better site'. Maybe it should be: 'less time = better site'.

Visitor 4 stayed the shortest period of time, just 1', and wasn't happy either so 'less time' isn't guaranteeing the 'better site'.

So as you can see: we had 2 happy visitors and 2 unhappy visitors. From the happy visitors, 1 stayed 'above average' and another 'below average'. And for the unhappy visitors, we had 1 staying 'above average' and another 'below average'. By just looking at the Time on Site metric, we can't say if 'more time' is better or 'less time' is better. So we have to start interpreting. Maybe somebody thinks that for the majority of the visits 'more time' is better. Another person will argue the opposite.
This brings us back to Avinash, which states the following when writing about 'Exit Rates'.

If you have to overlay your own opinions and interpret any metric whether the data is 'good' or 'bad ', then you have a bad metric on your hands. 

Avinash states this when discussing whether a high Exit Rate of a page is good (people got to do what they wanted to do and left happily) or bad (people got stuck and left on that page).

In my opinion, the same thing happens to 'Time on Site'. There is no way to know if the data, for 'Time on Site', relates to a good or a bad thing.

What's the solution?

A better metric than Time on Site would be 'Time to Task Completion'. It's a metric that Gerry McGovern (pictured right) uses in his 'Top Task Management' strategy. McGovern argues that first you have to find out what the Top Tasks are on your site: the most important tasks for which visitors come to your site. These tasks can be subscribing for a newsletter, booking a flight, or buying a product. Once you've got the top tasks, McGovern argues that you have to use remote usability tests to see what percentage of your users can complete these top tasks and how long it would take. For this last one he uses 'Time to Task Completion' metric. And he's clear about it: the time to completion should be as low as possible. On the web, people are very impatient, and you do these people a favour when completing a task takes as little as possible.

Let's look at some practical examples:

YouTube: you would think that it's important for YouTube that people stay 'as long as possible' on their site. The main purpose of the site is to let people see videos, so more Time on Site means more time to watch videos.
But we could do the exercise again like above:

Visitor 1 comes to YouTube, looks for a video that he wants to see. It's a video of 2'. He watches it and leaves the site. He stayed 3'.

Visitor 2 comes to YouTube, looks for a video, only finds it after 3 searches, starts watching, he doesn't like it, searches again a couple of times and leaves unhappy after 5'. So is it really better to have a bigger Time on Site?

If I were YouTube, I'd find out my Top Task, which could be 'Find video' (= how good does my search work), 'Find and watch another video' (= retain people who've watched a video) and I'd measure the time it took people to complete these tasks. That would give ideas to give a better experience.

Facebook: Instead of measuring Time on Site for Facebook, I'd optimize the 'time to comment on wall-post of friends', 'time to upload pics', 'time to create an invite for an event'.

News Sites: especially for content sites, like news sites, it is said that 'Time on Site' is an important metric. When people stay longer on your site, they read more articles and that would mean a better value-offer.
Again, I'm not sure about this: personally I also use these sites to have a quick look on what's going on and 'long articles' isn't what I'm especially looking for. So maybe a 50'' visit in which I can see the 5 highlights at a glance is what I'm looking for, not the qualitative 30' visit.

Last remark on Time on Site: Metrics should always invite for taking action. In my experience, Time on Site is a very difficult metric to improve with marketing actions. So  if you're using the metric for your action plan, you'll find that it is very difficult that your actions influence this metric the way you want to.

Wiseri: how I found my new job

Today I start my new job and I’m very excited about that. To celebrate, I gave my blog a new lay-out.


I’ve been working in an on-line agency specialized in e-commerce and now I make the jump of working again client-side, taking care of an e-commerce website. Of course, I’ll miss working with some great professionals and learning different businesses and different solutions, but 2011 will be the e-commerce year for Spain and I’m glad to be a part of it.

I’m very proud that I found my new job on twitter. In 2009 I found my job using LinkedIn, and I thought that was so cool. I know, LinkedIn is about networking and job-offers, but it was still nice that a social network site helped me get a job.

Now, in 2011, it’s twitter that got me a job: I started following @currofile a couple of months ago when somebody I follow retweeted an offer from @currofile.

Currofile is Marina Zaliznyak, who started connecting online/mobile/digital professionals with companies looking to fill an IT position. It started as a nice one-person mission of Marina, connecting jobseekers and companies, and soon it turned into Wiseri, a company dedicated to searching jobs for IT jobseekers and finding qualified candidates for companies looking to hire.

The things I most like from @wiseri

You deal with real people. And very nice people, I must say.

When dealing with Wiseri, you receive a direct and very personal approach. They understand your situation and won’t push you to go for something that you’re not comfortable with.

They have good positions, and they stick to what they know.

In the small period of time wiseri have announced a vast amount of jobs: from technical profiles to marketing and from interships to senior management.

Luckily they don’t accept just any recruitment process. For instance, I’ve done some interviews for the ‘big’ recruitment firms in the past and it was quite strange that for an e-business position I had to explain the recruiter how you have to work search engines. This won’t happen with @wiseri: they know the business, so they know if their might be a good match between job and candidate.

They will tell you when you are perfect for a job and when you‘re not.

@wiseri will help you find a job, but they’ll also tell when a job is a bit out of your league. At least they told me. A couple of times.

Wiseri know how to use twitter, which means: engagement and transparency.

It’s really nice to see these people do what they do: they use twitter in a very genuine way to connect with people. They’re not afraid to tweet about offers which aren’t theirs, they give advice on your CV, and they talk straight up. It’s all very transparent and it’s nice to feel that these people like to do what they do.

They’re also very good at doing their own marketing: for somebody looking to change jobs, there is no better publicity than when you see a recruitment agency tweeting ‘We’ve fixed another interview for a happy candidate’.

I’m very grateful for @wiseri for helping me with this new opportunity. Today, as it is my first day on the new job, they can tweet: ‘Happy candidate starts first day on new job thanks to @wiseri’. 

Addthis Analytics: New Features 2011

AddThis just launched a couple of new features for their Analytics.

What is AddThis?
AddThis is one of those services that can be implemented on your site or blog which publish your page or site in social networking sites. These services (there are various providers and they tend to be free), invite you to ‘Share This Page’ and when you click on the logos of your favourite social networking site, the page is published on your wall in Facebook or as a tweet on twitter, so your friends can see what pages you are reading, what you like,...

Analytics for AddThis

Recently I compared the data and analytics provided by AddThis with some other services. AddThis has a very good analytics section on their page, in which you can see how many times people share your pages on different social media platforms, how much traffic this sharing brought back, what content was mostly shared,...

New Features
Just before Christmas, AddThis launched some new features for their analytics section, which are pretty cool, I must say.

The improvements are based on 2 characteristics of this service:

1. AddThis is used on various sites. This means that AddThis has the power to cross-track shares and visits of people on different sites: for instance, if I share content from a Sports site using AddThis and afterwards I share content from a Music site using AddThis, AddThis knows that I’m the same person who shares (and hence most likely ‘like’) both topics of Sports and Music. Considerations about privacy aside (maybe we don’t like/want AddThis to know all this about us), all this represents great Insights for website owners who use AddThis: visitors who share the content of my site – what other content do they like/share?

2. AddThis is an external provider. This means that if you use it on your site, you need to implement a little code on your site, which is external. By doing this, you actually give access to AddThis to obtain data of your site. AddThis can track how many people come to your site, how they got to your site, what they do on the site… This is all very valuable information, and you when you implement AddThis, you give this information to an external party for free. So it might just be good that AddThis uses this information to give value back to the websites who give free data to them.

Important parenthesis:

Other services, like ShareThis, also have these characteristics and are also able to cross-track visitors who share on different sites, and they can also track all the analytics of your page. ShareThis already started in the summer of 2010 to use both ways to give cross-track and competative data to the users. I discussed this information in this post.

Back to AddThis:

In my opinion, the 2 most important new features are the following:

Audience:

AddThis uses the information it has from shares via AddThis on other sites to report on the Audience's interests: what the people who come to your site ‘also like’. So you can see if ‘Sharers’ of your content also like Sports, or Music.
It's important to note that if you have very few shares or your visitors don't share much on sites which use AddThis, maybe you won't have enough data to get something usefull from this. 

Searches & Referrers: AddThis starts using the information of where the visitors who share content of your site come from. It gives 2 reports: First the 'Searches', which represents the keywords people use in search engines to come to your site and which visits resulted in shares of your pages. Second there is the  Referrers report, which represent the sites people visited before coming to your site and sharing a page.

Of course, it would be massive to see these Searches & Referrers crossed also with the click-backs, not only with the Shares: what searches resulted in people sharing and did those shares also resulted in people coming back to your site? This might be a something useful for a future launch.

More new features of AddThis Analytics

There are some other new features which are also pretty cool:

First AddThis introduces a metric called ‘Influencers’: AddThis used to report on the visitors who came to your site and shared content, and those visitors who came back after somebody shared content. Now there is a new metric, which is the number of the sharers who actually drive traffic back.

Then there is the new metric ‘Lift’: it represents the percentage of visits that the shares drive back: for instance, 100 Shares which bring back 20 visits represent 20% of Lift (=20/100).

AddThis also includes mentions and comments on Twitter and Facebook. This is a form of Social Monitoring, which is not new. Though it is nice that it comes integrated in another Analytics platform, so you have both the ‘Social Bookmarking’ data from AddThis and the Social Monitoring in 1 application.

Another improvement is the Countries report, which shows in which country your content is shared and click-backed. Before these new features, AddThis only showed continents, which wasn’t a particularly enlightening way of representing where people were sharing your content.

Feedback

When launching all these new features, AddThis asked about feedback. First of all, I'd like to say AddThis has done a great job with these new features. Some comments:

My first comment would be an obvious one: it would be nice if all these features were integrated in Google Analytics and other Web Analytics tools. I know this is not easy and will take time, but still.

Second, ShareThis has a competitive feature, where it compares how many people share content on your site with how many people share on similar sites. Such a report is very actionable: it gives a great idea whether you can improve shares or not. So it would be great if AddThis also worked on this.

Third: it would be nice to start include ‘Site goals’ in the analytics of AddThis. I've discussed this before when comparing the Analytics of various sharing providers, and I don’t think it can be that difficult to develop an integrated method (with some kind of pixel or tracking which can be implemented in the ThankYou – pages) to see what all this sharing and clicking-back helps with achieving the goals for your site.

Related post:

Comparing Analytics of AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny and SocialTwitst

How to track visits after sharing in Facebook

How to track visits after sharing in Twitter

To see all the features, you can watch this video of AddThis:

My Tag Cloud of SEO in 2010

In 2010 I managed to write some posts which found an audience in Search Engines.
I've done a little Tag-Cloud using Wordl to see what Searches drove more traffic to my blog: it looks like the audience that found me was looking for information on tracking shares in Facebook using AddThis, ShareThis and AddToAny.

Related Post (August 2010): Use Wordl Tag-Cloud to Improve SEM/SEO Strategy 

My letter to the Three Kings

In Spain little (and not so little) children get their presents from the Three Wise Men on January 6^th and not from Santa or Saint Nicholas. In order to get their preferred gift, they need to write a letter, telling the Three Kings that they’ve been good last year and then they list their most wanted gifts.

Here’s my letter and request for gifts.

Queridos Reyes Magos // Dear Three Wise Men.

I think I’ve been a good on-line marketing and analytics boy this past year for the following reasons:

I’ve segmented, targeted and tested, reported and optimized. Reporting, analyzing, providing Insights and putting all this in improvements has been great this year. We did a couple of A/B tests, started to measuring the opinion of our visitors. We dug deep into the data and based our decisions on these data. I’ve also very much enjoyed the ‘urgency’ that comes with working for e-commerce sites.

Dear Wise Men, please give me this year the same challenges and tools to use data to improve customer satisfaction and revenue. Let’s improve and let’s convert!

I’ve been trying new tools this past year: Unica Netinsight (my own reporting tool: creating reports and defining variables), Google Analytics (always improving), WebCEO, 4Q (Voice of Customer, hurrah!), AddThis and ShareThis (great new analytics tools, both of them), MouseTrace (let’s keep an eye on them).

Dear Wise Men, please give me new tool, new ideas how to use them and new developments from the providers of the tools to test, to use and to help with improving. High on my list are Optimizer and Crazy Egg.

I’ve read books and blogs in 2010.

The best post was, without any doubt the Anchoring Effect from You Are Not So Smart. About how our mind uses anchors (like ‘original prize’) guide us to estimate prices or numbers. Greatly written, very well explained, mindblowing.

I’ve also enjoyed a couple of books, like the classic The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

Also The Stranger’s Long Neck by Gerry McGovern was very interesting, making a defence of and presenting a method on improving Task Management.

Dear Kings, please give me new posts all-day, every-day to read and read and time to read it all. I mostly need time to read Web Analytics 2.0 and Cult of Analytics.

The past year I’ve also been a good boy, since I’ve written in my blog. I even got some kind of small audience, and even the search engines are giving me some traffic to some popular posts.

Please Wise Men, give me time and inspiration for this year to write interesting posts which are useful for my readers. I especially want time for a series of posts on Web Analytics and statistics. The idea is there, I just need the time. I might even want to squeeze a White Paper out of that idea.

I must say that I dedicated a lot of time to my passion, the Internet. Please Wise Men, don’t stop giving me more Internet, more to explore, more new stuff to start using like my foto-blog on tumbr. A good start for enjoying Internet in all it’s glory was the new job I found via twitter. I got that in advance, thank you Wise Men!

On a more personal note, I’ve been dedicated in using and updating the pretty cool Runkeeper to keep up with running and working out. Please Wise Men, let me keep using Runkeeper to get rid of those 5 kilos.

Please, Three Wise Men!! Pretty please??

A very quick look back on 2010.

1. The Internet is mine! We owns it!

2010 news year’s hangover had just gone away, and we already had to deal with the funniest moment of the year: the speech of the CEO of Telefonica, the biggest Internet Provider in Spain. Really sorry that it’s in Spanish, but it’s too funny to leave it out.

The argument of this CEO is that his company Telefonica, as Internet Provider, ‘owns’ the Internet and since they do everything (infrastructure, customer care, after-sales, billing,…) companies like Google (who just have algorithms and don’t do anything) should start paying fees to Telefonica (and AT&T) for the use of their networks. In February he assured that Internet companies would start paying such fees in 2010; since this didn’t happen, maybe it’s a sigh that he doesn’t really get it.

2. Science Investigates Usability
It was nice to see this summer (thanks to the great blog of TalleresSEO) that Scientific Investigation investigates the Internet and at Usability.

A study was published that gave a new look at the eye-tracking (where people look at on an internet page) of search result pages.

The study is pretty amazing, since it segments different search behaviour: it separates search results for people who search for information, search for navegation or search for transactional reasons. Of course, the behaviour is different for each segment (people who search for transactional reasons do look at the AdWords on the right hand side). Hurray for Segmentation!

The fact that science studies this is amazing: they’re the specialists in investigation, in methodology, in designing experiments, in doing statistical analysis. Such a pity then that there seems to be a mayor methodological error in this paper: Marcos & González-Caro conclude that people search for information or search to navigate, don’t look very much to the Paid Results, and they note that ‘this might be because in some cases of our experiment there weren’t any Paid Results‘… Now how can you conclude that somebody doesn’t look at something, if it’s not even there in many cases? It’s a bit too obvious that they don’t look, right? I’m not a scientist, but I would say that you have to contemplate 2 cases: How people behave when there are Paid Results and how people behave when there aren’t. Putting data together of people who hade a result page with paid results and others without them and then concluding that people don’t look at them, seems like a mistake to me.

You can download the whole study here. Sorry, again in Spanish, though with abstract in English.

3. Google Instant Launch

Methodological mistake or not, the results of the study discussed above were soon out of date, since Google decided to update the result pages. It Launched Google Instant: the Search results were automatically updating while you type, changing the way we use Google’s Search Engines. It came as a pretty big boom, but even the week later, it felt like something so natural, so useful and natural that it was instantly a Google classis. Later they launched Google Preview, with the same effect: like you can’t remember that it once wasn’t there.

The launch of Instant was also very Google and very beautiful: 2 doodle (modified logos of Google on the Search page) showed what Google was up to: it could change his page while you interacted with your mouse and with the Search Box. 

4. Second funniest moment of 2010

Hell yeah: why did anybody bother with developing web pages since 1997, when you see how perfectly this site is designed. 

http://www.hostaltokio.com/

5. Facebook gets real

Facebook has been a while with us, and for a lot of people it has just become a part of our lives, just like email has been for a long time: you have it, you use it, no big thing. We use FB to send messages, chat with friends and upload some pics. But Facebook might just become a real player in Internet in 2011, starting to use the power it has to innovate so many things. I realised that when I read this article from Blind Five Year Old on ‘Organic Search’ results in Facebook.

In short:

• Facebook has already an equal number of daily searches as Google. They’re mostly searches for friends or groups, but the potential is there.
• We use Facebook a lot, so using the search bar within Facebook might be easier then going to another page to search.
• Facebook has these ‘Like’ buttons on a lot of pages. These are very good indications of what you or your friends like, and gives FB a nice tool to index pages using these ‘Like’ buttons in a social way. If a lot of people like a page, it might be good result in searches.
• Facebook already puts search results of external sites for its searches, so it will be a case of developing and Google Search might have (at last) a real competitor.

It is often said that Google might not really understand Social, but Facebook might as well understand Search. And Google still gets a very large part of it’s income from search.

The whole article (pretty techy, actually):

http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/facebook-seo

Happy New Year!

On-line Surveys: Best Practices and Sky.com example

I'm a BIG, BIG fan of on-line surveys. To make a really great website, you need to find out why people come to your site and if they find what they're looking for. The easiest way to find out what somebody wants is to ask him: say hello to on-line surveys.
If you launch a survey, you'll find that a lot of people are very willing to give their opinion and will give you very valuable and actionable feedback.

To give you a quick list some things you can expect using on-line surveys:

• You can find out what the priorities of your visitors are and take action.
• You can find out what people can do on your site and what they can't and take action.
• You can find out what people like on your site or what they don't like and take action.
• You'll find out how many visitors already purchased on your site and take action.

Let's look at a practical example.

Recently I visited the site of Sky UK, the provider of satellite TV and related telecommunications services. When visiting the section on High Definition, a little window popped up on my screen asking if I want to help with a little survey.

I really like this way of doing surveys: you ask a real-time visitor to help filling out the survey at the end of their visit.

How does this work?

When you accept to do the survey, a new window opens underneath your browser and you're asked to answer the questions at the end of your visit.
This is double-clever: first you invite a visitor in real time while he's busy visiting your site. This is: your visitor is having a real-time and real-life experience with your site. There is no better audience then this one to give you feedback.
And second, you'll ask the opinion of the visitor right after he visits. Not an hour after, not a day after: right on the spot, seconds after visiting your site.

If you accept to participate in the survey, you'll see something like this:

Good Practise 1: Be brief

During the survey, you're asking somebody's opinion which means that you're asking time and effort. So be a good boy or girl, and don't abuse of the good intentions of your visitors: ask what's necessary, be brief. And in case you want to ask a lot: launch various surveys to different people. Better to ask 10 questions in 3 different surveys then 30 questions in 1 survey.

Good Practise 2: Be transparent

A good idea for being transparent is using a bar indicating the progress of the survey. Your visitors will be grateful to know how much time they'll need to complete the survey.

Looking back at second screenshot, you'll see that the first question of the survey was: are you a client or not? This brings us to:

Good Practise 3: Segmentation

You're going to ask a number of different visitors what they think of your site, and you better be sure not all of your visitors are the same. Socio-demographic segmentation is very important, the question on being client or not is something else. You try to found different types of audiences on your site. This is a very important difference for any type of site. For an e-commerce site like Sky.com, the difference between client or not is very relevent: you'll want to give different services and content to these different groups.
For a site like Amazon, you might want to ask if the user already purchased before on the site. For a site like BMW.com, maybe you want to ask if the visitor will be purchasing a new car in the next 3 to 6 months. How to best segment, depends on your business and it might take some brainstorming to see how best to implement this question.

Next question on the Sky Survey was this one:

Good Practise 4: Task Management

This is a good one: why did you come to visit this site? This is the purest form of Task Management: you can consider that every visitors comes to your site with a purpose, and you just ask what this purpose is. The free on-line survey 4Q is based on this idea: it asks why you came to visit the site and if you were able to complete the task.
That's so great: in that way you get to know why people come to visit your site (look at video, find offer, compare with competitor, download form,...) and what tasks are doing good (=visitors gets to download the for he's looking for) or not (=visitor doesn't find prices to compare with your competitor). This is called Task Completion Ratio: what percentage of visitors interested in a specific task get to complete that specific task.

Unfortunately, Sky didn't ask the Task Completion Ratio. It just asks what the main reason is for you to visit your site and moved on to the next question.

Good Practise 5: Ask about site-goals.

This 'Did you purchase'-question is not a bad one: a site like Sky has a clear goal of selling subscriptions or upgrades to, for instance, their High Definition services. So it's pretty straightforward to ask if the visitor purchased that day.
But I think it's not very subtle. First of all, I suppose there are not so many people purchasing Sky HD the exact same day as visiting a site. It's not buying a car, but it's still a bigger buy then, say, a loaf of bread. Second, I suppose that Sky's web analytics or call center will already tell the ratio of purchases. Third, it sounds a bit intrusive: people know that Sky sells stuff, but it feels a bit premature and a bit pushy to ask directly if the visitor purchased.
But above all, I think it shows the interest of the company (to sell) and doesn't take in account that people could be in various stages of a purchase process. The survey doesn't take advantage of braking down the process in different steps and finding out what the satisfaction-rate of each step is. It just takes purchasing as final goal and that's it. If you break down a purcase process you can and defining goals for every stage of the process. These are called micro-goals, and every micro-goal adds to the main goal.

Good Practise 5 revisited: Ask about micro-goals

Next question:

The next question is again a good one. I would have asked for micro-goals (every step in the purchase process), but it's still good to ask why people didn't buy at this stage. This will give you an idea of what you can improve. But: if asking wether you purchased or not might seem a bit pushy, asking why not might even be worse.

Good Practise 6: Be action-orientated

The next question is a typical one, and I must say that I'm not a fan. The question is: what would you change on our site?

In my experience, people don't normally know what needs to be changed on a site and you'll probably end up with some answers which aren't actionable.
For instance: if somebody answers on the survey that he wants more info on HD – how would you change your site? 'More information' is something very general and  you don't really have a clue of where to start. When a lot of people ask for more information, your manager might ask you to publish whatever information you can get your hands on. So in no time, you'll get a site impossible to manage or to navigate, probably full of useless information. It might be a lot more useful to know that a visitor was trying to find out if he could watch the World Cup in High Definition and that he couldn't find the information necesary. Now that's actionable information.

If the last question wasn't actionable, the one following is really company-focused and not at all customer focused. Before you read the question, take a deep breath:

Does the Sky HD section on the site make you think of Sky as a follower or a leader?

What? Can you repeat that question? Or maybe better: don't repeat the question and let me just close this survey-window and I'll continue with my own business. Bye!

Serious. I know companies are interested in knowing what people think of them, and what the 'core brand values' are. But is on quick on-line survey really the place to ask such questions? You can't waste your visitor's time. If you do, they disconnect and leave the survey unanswered.

Best Practice 7: Be customer centered

I'm sure you agree that the language in the question above is very company-centered. And it's not just one question: it's a whole list.
There is also another problem with that last question: When you ask people to answer on a scale from 1 to 7, people tend to put their score at the center, which makes the answers to your question pretty much not relevant. Gerry McGovern explains this in this white paper on surveys, arguing that scaling the answers are bound to give you incorrect feedback.
Another issue with scaled answers is that, on a scale from 1 to 7 some people will give a 7 for very good and a 1 for very bad, and others a 5 for very good and a 3 for very bad, even if they experience the same value of 'very good' or 'very bad'. You could say that some people answer more 'extreme' then others. Luckily there are techniques to overcome this, but make sure you use them.

The following question also uses scaling, but at least has a pretty relevant question: how satisfied are you with your visit and how likely you are to tell a friend about it.

Next up are some socio-demographic questions. These are very relevant for the segmentation talked about above.

Good Practise 8: Be consistent

Last is an invitation to subscribe on a emailing list for further surveys.

This is OK to do, but it's a bit dodgy: a lot of people are willing to give feedback for free, but they don't want you to take advantage of them. So if you promise that a survey will be anonymous, maybe it's better to be consistent with this promise and do not to ask personal data, not even e-mail.
The same remark holds for giving incentives to people for answering a survey: if you promise somebody a gift for helping with a survey, you'll need his address and name to send him his gift. So even if you don't cross this personal data with the answers of the survey, your visitors won't believe you when you say it's an anonymous survey.
In general, it's not necessary to give the participants of the survey a gift. People are very generous and are very happy to give you feedback and help you to improve, just for free. That's a very nice things so keep Best Practice 7 in mind: bo customer centered.

Good practice 9: Be polite
Say thanks at the end of the survey.