Use on-site surveys to increase conversions
Use on-site surveys to increase conversions
1. Clearly define your business objectives and the goals you want to achieve.
Having clear goals helps you to focus your strategy to meet them.
2. Decide what kind of data you need to collect and what you will do with it to achieve your goals.
This helps ensure you ask the right questions. Ask yourself: What pages are crucial to my business? What over- or under-performing pages could benefit most from additional insight? Where in the conversion funnel are there any leaks that need investigating?”
3. Use tools like Google Analytics to identify qualified users to survey.
Look at your average time on site and page views per person metrics and identify users with above-average engagement as qualified users. One heuristic method to follow is to target people just above-average engagement. This way, you’re getting users who are at least considering converting.
4. Use your analysis data to identify the best place and time to ask your questions.
For example, you might notice that a particular page on your site receives more page views than others and users spend more time on it. This would be a good place to show your survey. Asking the right questions on the right pages at the right times is crucial to the success of your on-site surveys. For example, don’t ask, Why are you here today? during the checkout, and don’t ask users why they didn’t buy anything the moment they land on your site.
5. Create a list of survey questions based on your strategy and business goals.
There’s no single magic question that resonates with every audience, though, there are two ways you can go about setting up your on-site survey: Open-ended questions Yes/no questions with an explanation. The questions you ask and the actionable insights you receive all depend on your strategic goals. In general, however, think about trying to answer why users came to your site and what the sources of friction (if any) are. Here are a few example open-ended and yes/no questions you could ask: What is the purpose of your visit today? (Open-ended.) Were you able to find the information you were looking for? (Open-ended – this can identify missing information on the site and works best on product pages.) Are there any questions you haven’t been able to find answers to? (Yes/no + explanation.) Were you able to complete your tasks on this website today? (Yes/no + explanation – if the answer is no, allow your visitor to expand on the reason why.)
6. Have someone not invested in the outcome of the survey review the questions to mitigate cognitive bias.
Cognitive bias can easily affect both survey creation and analysis results. It can cause you to overtly focus on responses that back up what you already think. Having someone not invested in the survey outcome ensures any preconceptions don’t affect the questions asked.
7. Use on-site tools like Qualaroo, HotJar, Qualtrics, or Webengage to implement your survey.
Implementation should be a secondary consideration to your strategy, and there are plenty of tools available that make it easy to add on-site surveys to your site.
8. Experiment with different questions, user groups, and times.
There’s no single magic solution to on-site surveys, but experimenting with different types of questions, users, and times can help you get more actionable insights. For example, you might find that open-ended questions give you more insight than simple yes/no questions. Testing different user groups, such as new customers against repeat customers, can also help minimize the effects of voluntary response bias since anyone who participates in your surveys inevitably has to choose to participate. For example, you might find that surveying repeat visitors can be more reliable than presenting questions to every site visitor, or that presenting your survey at key bottlenecks in your conversion path affects your conversion rate.