iPerceptions’ Free 4Q Service Gets Into Visitors’ Heads

Want to know what your visitors are thinking? iPerceptions has launched a free version of their MarketMotive service to help site owners with that very task. Called 4Q, it asks randomly selected visitors who opt in four fundamental questions:

  • Why did you come here?
  • Did you accomplish what you hoped?
  • Why or why not?
  • What was your overall experience?

The service is a joint effort by the web survey firm and blogger/author/analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, who is an adviser to the company.

Voice-of-the-customer analytics fill a gaping hole in the information desired by site operators. Traditional web analytics tools show you what users did — whether they bought a product or abandoned a transaction, for example — but seldom reveal why. “Gleaning insights from your web site data has meant a delightful and extensive torture of your clickstream data. But the story it tells is only about the what,” said Kaushik. “Free solutions like 4Q give you easy access to the why data.”

The release of 4Q is an attempt to introduce voice-of-the-customer approaches to a broader audience, from bloggers to small site operators. The company’s for-pay service is used by many automotive, consumer electronics and hospitality companies to get inside the heads of their visitors. The pay version also lets users customize questions and get a larger number of responses each day, and calculates a proprietary satisfaction index.

With marketers starved for insight into online motivations, the voice-of-the-customer segment is poised for growth. iPerceptions competitor Foresee Results closed $20 million of venture financing in March 2007 to buy out management company Compuware’s stake in the firm, and iPerceptions itself went public last summer, following eight years of private operation. Other online survey firms include Opinionlab, Surveymonkey and Responsetek.

iPerceptions’ CEO Jerry Tarasofsky gives the example of a hotel chain that was experiencing significant abandonment during bookings. The client was furiously changing its site to reduce the loss. But visitor surveys showed that those buyers weren’t coming to buy — they wanted to check room availability. “You have employees trained on clickstream analysis who know how to tweak the site and can combine it with A/B testing,” said Tarasofsky. “What they don’t know is why someone is coming and what they’re looking for.”

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