4Q Survey Helps Answer Why Visitors Come

An article by Paul Prewitt    9 Comments

If you have not tried the free 4Q Survey tool by Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions then you are behind the game. The 4Q Survey is designed to help you better understand “Why” people are coming to your site.

Well, who better to explain what 4Q is all about then Avinash the original creator himself. To hear Avinash’s explanation visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2LJliORQPQ.

So the video leaves out one simple thing to help the sales pitch for any tool, results. Therefore, we’ll be going over the Arkansas Alumni Association’s results for the survey loaded on the www.arkalum.org (only domain loaded on as we have others too). Since the tool has only been online for a few months we’ll go over September 2008 as we have full statistics for.

Since I’m a designer at heart lets start out with the important part, how it works and looks on my site (after all their logo is green).

So it is pretty simple looking and will fit into almost any site. Also since they co-brand it to your organization it appears to come from you and looks rather good.

Last but more importantly is our results. After all why bother unless you can actually get something out of the tool. Well, they claim that you can get the answer to “Why” and that you can and so much more.

First we can get a simple view of our overall participant satisfaction and even get a satisfaction trend over the life of the survey. This can tell us if our site needs improvement and even what needs improvement.

Next up is the Task Completion score (comparable to Goals in Google Analytics). This is probably the most significant score you can get on the tool as it helps answer tell if visitors completed the goal they came to the site for.

Last up is probably the most complicated portion of the survey but also the very best part too. The “purpose” distribution helps us tell “why” a visitor came and if it was successful visit. Not only based on our predefined purposes/goals but also allowing for the user to define their own.

Although the free version is lacking in exporting tools for the data a little time on ones part and all the collected qualitative data can be pulled out in a usable form. After we get all the data pulled out we can run it through a Tag Cloud generator like www.tagcrowd.com and start learning what is really important to our visitors.

Update: Sarah-Jane Morris, Marketing Manager at 4Q/iPerceptions pointed out that there is a new data export feature available in the 4Q Survey results section.

Below we see the top user defined purposes (for those completing their task) for September 2008. The top three are: scholarship, information, and alumni.

Also, we can see the top user defined purposes (for those not completing their task) for September 2008. The top three are: scholarship, information and alumni.

The above two clouds can defiantly help us to determine what is important to our site visitors and possibly what we should be promoting in the months ahead. Also the clouds can be generated for each of the specific purpose responses (open-ended comments collected).

All in all, this is a great tool for understanding “Why” a visitor is on your site and better yet if they are able to accomplish their goal/task. If you have not tried this tool out yet then I would strongly recommend it, as it has helped us learn that information “news and other” is very important to our visitors (but previously was at the bottom of our list).

“Why” not try it today!
http://4q.iperceptions.com