In my post, A Model to Improve Traffic Conversion, I refer to four questions that must be answered to effectively recommend and prioritize changes that improve conversion rates. In this post, I explain why it’s so important to understand, “Why did they come?” Analyzing a visitor’s motivation, their intent or purpose, provides meaningful insight as to whether you are driving the right kind of traffic to your site. In capturing motivation, we are also able to create visitor segmentation groups – allowing us to study each group separately.

Model Attributes

Answers Question: Why did they come?
Type of Data: Qualitative Data
Intent or Result: Intent

Qualitative Data

Determining motivation, or intent, involves qualitative data. Before getting into the mechanics of capturing this information from the visitor, let’s briefly review the difference between qualitative and quantitative data.

Qualitative data is subjective.  It deals with descriptions that can be observed. In contrast, quantitative data deals with numbers and can be measured.

If you ask a visitor an open question, “Why did you visit us today?” you are asking for qualitative data. By asking the same questions and providing a few “common” answers in addition to a free-form text box, you essentially provide a way to measure “motivation”. The answer is qualitative. Because we can measure it, we can approximate quantitative data from qualitative data.

Make sense? Don’t worry if it doesn’t. All that matters is that by asking visitors to disclose their intent, you are capturing information which can then be used as metrics that can be studied with the rest of your data.

What are the Benefits to Capturing Motivation?

The ability to assess traffic quality and the ability to segment visitors are the key benefits of capturing motivation.

Traffic Quality

It’s not enough to drive traffic to your site. In Analyzing Traffic Sources, I describe how to collect basic web analytics and how the data can be analyzed to measure a source’s rate of success in meeting the site or business goals.

But what about the goals of your visitors?

People come to your site for a reason. When that reason is in alignment with your site’s goals, you’re golden and can move on to increasing satisfaction. When the two aren’t aligned, the first question you should ask is, “Am I driving the right people to my site?”

Establishing intent offers a first glimpse as to whether that visitor will be successful on your site.

As a crude example, let’s say the purpose of your site is to sell photography equipment and film. So you set up a PPC campaign, bidding on the phrase “buy film online” and title your ad “Buy Film Online”. The campaign is generating a high volume of traffic, but you haven’t seen an increase in sales. By analyzing the intent of your visitors from this campaign, you can easily understand the reason for this:

• 2% visited to purchase film
• 1% visited to research the price on film
• 97% visited for another reason

When looking at the “other” information, you can see that the primary reason for visits from this source is to buy movies and films.

Most savy search engine marketers would have been able to tell you this without analyzing intent that “buy film online” wouldn’t yield desired results for a company that sells film for photography. But this illustrates my point that getting the right traffic to your site matters. Capturing motivation from your traffic is a way to measure whether the goals of the visitor and site are aligned.

Segmenting Visitors by Goal

On which visitor would you focus when making site usability recommendations to increase ROI?

Visitor A: The user that came to your site to purchase a tripod, but did not make a purchase.

OR

Visitor B: The user that came to your site to learn more about career opportunities, but did not make a purchase.

While the business or site goal remains the same, the visitor’s intention differs. So does it make sense to group the experience of those looking for career opportunites with those visiting your site to make a purchase? By identifying intent, you can segment users that visit with the explicit intention of purchasing and evaluate their user experience through the purchase flow. With this information you can more accurately make recommendations to improve the site’s usability for those visitors coming to make a purchase.

(Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik has a great video of his discussion with the founders of ClickTracks on the topic of  segmentation at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2009/01/actionable-web-analytics-tips.html.)

Best Practices for Collecting Motivation

A simple window can be used to collect information about the user’s intent and motivation when visiting your site. The following best practices should be used when implementing a solution to gather this type of information.

1. Instill confidence.

Instill confidence by refraining from asking for demographic or personal information.  Most people have fallen prey (on and offline) to short surveys that inevitably take up more time than they’re willing to give up.  Make it clear through messaging that you are asking to help their experience.

To help improve your experience on {site name}, please tell us your primary reason for visiting us today.

2.  Keep the options simple

Some or all of the options you present will become system goals.  This way, you can determine the rate of visitors completing their intended goals.  But keep them simple and don’t make them think too hard. You want the visitor to answer the question, not skip it. For example:

The reason for my visit is to:

• Make a purchase
• Research a product
• Learn more about {company} and it’s products/services
• Other

3. Respect the experience

Be sure to add the ability to opt out of seeing the message again. If they do not opt out, throttle the message so they do not see this message each time the arrive on the site. For example, set the message to display 1 out of every 5 visits and/or 30 days.

You may also want to delay the display of the window.  I like to set mine to display only after 5 seconds or when the user navigates to the subsequent page.  This way the visitor has an opportunity to consume the page’s content before the intent request is made.

4. Make it optional

Don’t require that the user answer the question.  Make it optional.

5. Make it easy to answer the question

Make it easy for your users to answer the question. One way I’ve done this is by stylizing the options as buttons.  This way, it’s evident to the user that they only need to click once to answer the question.

In contrast, I would require slightly more effort to opt out and close.  By including a check box and a button, you make opting out a two click process.  By strategically placing a downplayed close link in a more difficult to reach location (e.g. bottom left of the window), you also add a bit more effort in finding the close button.  Not much, but enough.

Here’s an example of an overlay optimized for gathering intent.

Summary

Motivation is one of four key components in understanding the 360 degree view of your visitors. By capturing and analyzing visitor motivation you are armed with the information needed to make recommendations to improve traffic quality. Further, by asking a user to identify intent, you can segment groups to study to more effectively recommend site usability improvements based on that particular group’s experience.

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Tad Miller has a great post about how to combat some of the issues with advertising dollars shifting to PPC in  (Advertising Dollars are Shifting to PPC.  Now What?) One of his recommendations is to

…re-allocate the extra dollars to optimizing your website or landing pages to improve your conversion.

I couldn’t agree more.

For over a decade, I’ve struggled with gathering the right tool-set to provide me with the “complete picture” of my site’s traffic in an effort to optimize the site and increase the return on investments from my marketing campaigns.

No Complete Solutions

To my knowledge, there are no solutions that provide the 360 degree view of site visitors, but several solutions may be combined to get it.  This post isn’t about the solutions themselves, but in what I’ve modeled as the information needed to provide optimal conversion.

Note: Obzervant is building software to serve this need and more.  But in the meantime, a good review of the currently available tools  is warranted and planned for near-future posts.

What You Need to Know

To recommend and prioritize changes that improve conversion rates, 4 questions need to be answered about your traffic:

1. Where did they come from? (source)
2. Why did they come? (motivation)
3. What did they do? (activity)
4. What did they think? (perception)

Model Overview

The model requires both quantitative and qualitative information.  It also separates intent from result to achieve the information required to make recommendations for optimal conversion.  Keep in mind that data changes based on your visitors.  Constant analysis and monitoring of the data provides a good basis for perpetual and iterative improvements.

Source

Answers Question: Where did they come from?
Type of Data: Quantitative
Intent or Result: Intent

Web analytics solutions provide information about the domain and exact url that brought the visitor to your site.  You can also define and  append parameters like source and campaign (e.g. sr=linkedin, cm=banner ad) to urls to learn even more about the referring site, creative element, etc.

(Learn more about traffic sources in my follow-up post, “Analyzing Traffic Sources: Where are your visitors coming from?“)

Motivation

Answers Question: Why did they come?
Type of Data: Qualitative Data
Intent or Result: Intent

Understanding your visitors’ reveals purpose… intent.. motivation.

Laboratory usability testing involves participants that are given scenarios and are asked to perform tasks.  And while this type of usability testing is  a very effective tool in some instances, users are not self-motivated.

Quick polls asking the user of their intention is a valid means of determining intent.  Only after establishing intent can we measure whether the user completed their intended goal.

(Learn more about motivation in my follow-up post, “Finding Motivation: Why Did They Visit?“)

Activity

Answers Question: What did they do?
Type of Data: Quantitative
Intent or Result: Result

Again, web analytics provide information about the visitors’ journey while on your site.  Data collected may include page views, time on page/site and clicks.

If the solution provides an ability to set up goals, you can also look at the number of visitors achieving a business goal.  By establishing intent from the user, you can analyze the percentage of visitors achieving their goal as well as the effort involved (time to complete, number of pages and effort).

Perception

Answers Question: What did they think?
Type of Data: Qualitative
Intent or Result: Result

Triggered, exit and follow-up surveys provide key information to understand visitor satisfaction.  There are methods to gathering each of these that are user-friendly.  I personally hate surveys and close them whenever I see them.  However, there are ways to gather qualitative information without the users perceiving that the effort involved in providing you with that information will be arduous.

Challenge the Model

There you have it: a quick overview on a model for gathering information needed to increase conversion rates through site usability and traffic quality recommendations.

Over the next several posts  I will explain each section of the model.  Until then, I’d really appreciate your feedback.  Help me fine-tune the model by challenging it!

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