Survey Popups: 9 Types of Site Intercept Surveys
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, May 04, 2010
Intercepting visitors to your website can provide you with a range of useful information to complement your web and marketing analytics and the site usability testing that you do. Common applications we've seen from our customers involve site feedback, ecommerce optimization and general surveying.
Site Feedback Surveys
- Site Satisfaction Surveys - What do people like and dislike about the website? How satisfied are visitors with different sections of the site? What would they like to see more of or less of?
- Site Experience Surveys - What are visitors trying to do when they visit the site and do they accomplish it? Such surveys sometimes replace usability studies for small organizations but they are best done in conjunction with usability research. Intercept surveys also complement web analytics: usage data for different sections of the site might not reflect actual needs, if certain sections are hard to find or hard to use, or if other visitors mistakenly think other sections of the site are what they need.
- Site Redesign Survey - Site redesign studies can use intercept surveys in two ways. Such research can be short and driven from current traffic flow to get feedback on redesigns: "here's what the site looks like today, and here is this redesign: what do you think?" Alternatively, intercepts can be used to profile and recruit potential participants in a longer survey or research engagement.
E-Commerce Intercept Surveys
- E-Commerce Conversion Studies - Because small increases in conversion rates can generate dramatic increases in revenue for e-commerce sites, such sites often supplement their existing split tests of pages with popup surveys. Popup surveys provide valuable attitudinal information to augment the behavioral data from web analytics.
- Shopping-Cart Abandonment - A common subset of e-commerce conversion studies, shopping-cart abandonment polls answer the question: Why are people failing to complete transactions?
- Transaction Satisfaction - Some organizations use the completion of a sale as an opportunity to rate the overall transaction, from searching for products, researching and comparing products to making a purchase.
General Intercept Surveys
- Demographic Profiling - Large ad-supported sites that sell their own advertising (as opposed to solely relying on ad networks such as Google AdSense) need to provide current and prospective advertisers with detailed demographic or firmographic profiles of site visitors, much as traditional magazines do.
- Convenience Sampling - Some organizations drive people from the website to other surveys, for third parties or for their own internal purposes.
- Panel Recruitment - Finally, intercept surveys can be used to recruit and profile visitors to join an online access panel of visitors. This enable organizations to conduct more targeted site research for future studies rather than extensively screening visitors using popup surveys.
What other types of site intercept surveys have you seen?