Leveraging User Surveys to Improve Your Website

This post was originally published on ClarkNikdelPowell.com. 

User surveys are a simple, cost effective way to gather valuable feedback directly from your website’s visitors, and over the past couple of years, we’ve started integrating them into many of our website design and development projects.

In this post, I’ll explain how to set up a simple user survey and mine the results for helpful insights that you can use to improve your website.

Web Analytics Isn’t Enough

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics are indispensable for understanding what’s happening on your website. And, in the right hands, they can answer all sorts of interesting questions.

• How long do first time organic visitors on mobile phones stay compared to first time organic visitors on desktop?
• Where are we losing the most visitors in our shopping cart process?
• How many visits does the average user make to our site before they make sales contact?

These questions are all easily answered by analytics software.

But, as wonderful as it is to be able to answer those questions, web analytics has a serious blind spot. It does a great job telling you WHAT is happening on your site (page views, load times, traffic sources), but offers little insight into WHY those things are happening. Are users spending lots of time your site because your content is 10X better than anyone else’s and they just can’t get enough (yay!), or are they searching in frustration for information they just can’t find (boo!).

The solution then, is to combine quantitative analytics information with qualitative feedback from user surveys. When you do, you’ll get a fuller, more accurate picture of what’s actually driving behavior on your website and you’ll have a much better idea of how you can optimize your site for a better user experience and sweeter results.
User surveys are also an antidote to one of marketing’s most overlooked follies: marketing by first, best guess.

Marketing by First, Best Guess

In a perfect world, every important marketing decision would be informed by a pile of insightful, rigorous research. Unfortunately, smartly executed, statistically valid research is both expensive and time-consuming. As a result, there’s an understandable tendency to make important decisions based on the team’s first, best guess. As well-intentioned as those guesses may be, they’re frequently influenced by unchecked assumptions, group think, and the highest paid person’s opinion (aka. The HiPPO).

While not as robust as professionally executed research, user surveys provide a helpful middle ground between costly research and gut instinct. Lightweight and cost-efficient, user surveys can provide a much needed reality check for decision-makers.

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