March 7, 2008...8:16 am
4Q Free Web Visitor Survey - Free Fridays #12
This weeks (yes, I know it’s been a few weeks) free software is an online survey tool that enables you to collect opinions on what people think about your web site.
It’s very easy to implement, it’s very easy for the visitor to use, it’s free and it’ll provide you with invaluable feedback that can make a real difference in improving your web site.
4Q is provided by Avinash Kaushik of the Occam’s Razor blog and Web Analtyics fame and a company called iperceptions.com. You can sign up at 4q.iperceptions.com but let me explain a little about how it works first.
What Does 4Q Do?
The survey take about 10 minutes to set up and most of that time is spent waiting for the account activation email to arrive.
It’s based on four key questions that look at why people have visited your site and if they found what they were looking for or managed to achieve what they set out to do.
When a visitor enters your website, they are asked of they want to complete a quick survey when they have finished their visit. If they say yes, they can carry on and when they finish browsing, the survey is there for them to complete. If they say no, they won’t hear about they survey again.
You can switch the survey on and off at any time and you can also set it so that it only asks a certain number of visitors e.g. every 5th person etc.
To see an example of the survey in action, visit www.webglossary.co.uk and answer yes to doing the survey. Don’t worry about how you answer the questions, this is just a test site that I’m running the survey on.
Four Key Questions
Your visitor survey will ask people four key questions after they have visited your site and close their browser.
These are basically:
- Why are you here?
- Was it successful?
- If not why not?
- Were you satisfied?
These are the essential questions that will give you insight in to why people actually visit your web site and whether or not they were happy with the visit. This is the kind of information that normal web analytics cannot provide.
For example, imagine someone comes to your web site and looking to join your organisation. They might look on half a dozen pages on your website, then give up looking and go away. Web analytics can show you that the person arrive via a search engine, stayed for 4 minutes and looked at 6 pages. That could be regarded as a good visit. But the fact that they didn’t find what they were looking for makes it an unsuccessful visit.
Conversely, someone could come to your site looking for your phone number, visit the home page, stay for 10 seconds and write down you phone number. In terms of web analytics that could be deemed an unsuccessful visit. They didn’t stay and the results will show a 100% bounce rate for that visitor. But they left because they had found what they wanted.
This is why the good old Customer Satisfaction Survey is still necessary and 4Q enables you to easily implement one.
Setting Up 4Q
When you create your survey you just have to choose some options from a list of pre-made answers for question 1. These include things like, “Ask An Expert”, “Compare Products”, “Research” etc.
Once you’ve made those choices, you save your survey and receive access to one line of code which you can either drop into the footer of your website code or add to one particular page.
If you don’t maintain your own web site you can just email the code to your designer and they can very quickly add it to your web site.
It’s very easy to do and the breakdown of the results is very user friendly as well.
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