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RSSRecency and frequency can give you some insights about loyalty and time on-site might be indicative of a positive visit, but you won't be able to measure whether your visitor thinks your site is great or ghastly unless you ask them.
Classic Web analytics data (what did they click on?) has been referred to as data-rich but information-poor. You can tell exactly where people dropped out of a purchasing process or where they stopped reading a long story, but you're never going to know why.
Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, puts it this way: "When you read log file or sophisticated analytics reports, you surmise where to focus your attention. But when you look at actual customer comments, they'll tell you where you need work. Then use the analytics to figure out how well you're fixing the problem."
Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO of iPerceptions, thinks attitudinal metrics are important enough to give away for free. His company's 4Q program (4q.iperceptions.com) is a free pop-up survey that asks your visitors:
What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
Were you able to complete your task today?
If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?
Very simple and very insightful. No, this is not going to give you in-depth, rolling satisfaction scores. That's what iPerceptions does for a living. No, this is not going to give you in-depth, industry comparisons between your firm and others. That's what ForeSee Reults does for a living. But i4Q will give you a little bit of the all-powerful Voice of the Customer that will tell you where to start fixing things that you may not know are going wrong.
Attitudinal information is not the alternative to clickstream data. Visitor complaints give you a clue about your site's effect on visitors, but you have to look at clickstream data, see where visitors went on the site, and what they did. That combination is critical. "I couldn't find your phone number." is a strong message that there's something wrong with your Contact Us page. Unless they never got to your Contact Us page. In that case, there's a problem with your menu system.
How did people who had successful visits get from the home page to the shopping cart? Where did the unhappy folks bail out? Where did the unhappy people get flummoxed? Of those who deemed themselves successful, how many are likely to return and buy again? How did their clickstream differ from those who were successful but said they were unlikely to return? Did the happy/successful people click on something more often than those who left unfulfilled?
The attitudinal part of all of comes from asking people whether they were successful in accomplishing their goals, instead of focusing exclusively on your own. Those who were happy about their Web site experience show up at once end of the spectrum, those who were not, at the other end.
Attitudinal metrics give you a little more view into the hearts and minds of your marketplace. That's just what we've been hoping for.
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RSS FEEDS
Just some clarity to some of the confusion of popups.
Popups are blocked by default (I would venture a guess at) by 70% of people online, so from a research perspective, a popup based solicitation for feedback would exclude a large portion of site visitors, and therefore render most of the data non representative. Its for this reason, that 4Q uses the same solicitation process as our enterprise solution used by Fortune 200 clients - which is a two staged and permission based invitation. A random sample of people are presented with a solicitation for feedback on arrival, to participate in the survey on exit. This makes 4Q a true permission based onexit survey. Rather than use popups, we are using an interstitial layer to invite visitors. The invitation window resides on top of the page and the opacity of the tinted areas surrounding the layer is such that visitors can clearly recognize the content of the page underneath...So they know from whom this request is coming.
The reason(s) we use a two stage invitation, as opposed to a straight on exit survey, for one, is that exit surveys tend to yield a higher negative bias in the data (people who have had a bad experience are much more willing to provide feedback than people who have a mediocre or good experience). We eliminate this bias as best we can by getting permission up front of the visit...prior to the user experience even taking place. Again, This makes 4Q a true permission based onexit survey, and ensures that our data, is reproducible at high levels of confidence.
"The Quantitative to Qualitative Spectrum of Marketing Data" talks about this silde and makes an interesting Google search based on analytics phrases and vendors at: http://d98008.u25.bachcsi.com/?p=15