Forum Moderators: phranque
What do you want it to achieve?
You could focus your survey on a specific area, or for feedback on your site as a whole.
Are you looking for feedback or new ideas?
Are you just looking to get a demographic breakdown of your users?
JOAT
You could focus your survey on a specific area, or for feedback on your site as a whole. Site as a whole
Are you looking for feedback or new ideas? Both, our goal is to meet the needs of our visitor
Are you just looking to get a demographic breakdown of your users? Not as specific as name, but maybe job title
Questions to ask:
How did you find this site? (give options - directory, SE, advertising)
If SE, then what term?
What were you looking for? (text box for answer - qualitative information)
Did you find it? (If yes, then no problem. If no you either need to add that content, or improve navigation or site search if info is already there)
How easy were you able to find what you were looking for? (scale 1 to 10 - guage possible navigation issues)
Did you find anything else that was useful to you, if so what? (get an idea of what areas of your site are catching the attention of your users)
What features or information would you like to see on the site or what changes would you like to be made? (text box - qualitative information)
Also, you may consider adding some industry specific questions.
Hope this helps.
JOAT :)
I have some conducted some web site surveys in the past and thought I would provide you with some input (although you might have created your survey by now).
First of all, I tend to have several web surveys throughout the year … if you ask the visitors about everything in one go, you might end up with getting a very low response rate. You could for instance organize them in the following categories:
1. Marketing effectiveness survey
2. Web visitor profiling survey
3. Web site evaluation survey
4. Web site exit survey
Re (1) the marketing effectiveness survey, the focus is when and how they came across my site. In addition we ask them some demographical and industrial questions. In my case we spend money on advertising (online and offline), search engine optimization etc., and by measuring how people came across our site (from various sources), we know what we get for the money we invest.
Re (2) web visitor profiling survey, the main focus is identifying who they are. Here you can combine social- and demographical questions, as well as industry specific question (will obviously depend on if it is a B2B or B2C site). The important value for my company is too see whether the visitors we attract to our web site are within the target group(s) of the company.
Re (3) web site evaluation survey, the scope is … how can we make it better for the visitors in terms of (a) content, (b) graphical design, (c) navigation and (d) the total user experience. Sometimes I use what I call a “split screen” survey, where the actual web site is loaded into a separate frame or iframe of the survey page, allowing the respondent to click through the web site, while the survey “records” the clicks and asks relevant questions to each section of the web site. Another option is that you collect information about which sections they have visited (using cookie) and when the pop-up survey appear, you can have it tailored based on the behavioral data you have already collected (asking specific questions according to which section they have visited).
Re (4) web site exit survey, the challenge is to explain why visitors have certain behavior when they visit a web site. I spend hours analyzing my web logs, sometimes I discover that visitors drop out due to broken links etc, but sometime I can’t find the rationale for their behavior, and that is where exit survey plays an important role. For instance, if you discover that most visitors drop out during the registration process (after they have selected which product to purchase or something similar), you can place a pop-up web survey at that specific page, only triggered if they close the window. By identifying the reasons why people drop out at that specific point, you can improve the site and monitor if it has been successful.
Survey type (1), (2) and (3) I usually do several times a year (sometimes continuesly), allowing me to spot trends over time. Of course I don’t survey every visitor, but instead take a sample using a pop-up script. I also try to keep the number of questions to a minimum and if the survey is targeted at visitors I already have profile data on (people signing up to newsletters etc), I use that data without asking them the same questions again, to create aggregated reports.
