- Complete Web Monitoring
- Transactional Sites
- Collaboration Sites
- Software-as-a-Service Applications
- 3. What Could We Watch?
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming From?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- The Tools at Our Disposal
- 4. The Four Big Questions
- II. Web Analytics, Usability, and the Voice of the Customer
- 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
- Dealing with Popularity and Distance
- The Core of Web Visibility
- A Quick History of Analytics
- The Three Stages of Analytics
- Implementing Web Analytics
- Sharing Analytics Data
- Choosing an Analytics Platform
- The Up-Front Work
- Web Analytics Maturity Model
- 6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
- Web Design Is a Hypothesis
- Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior
- Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps
- Data Input and Abandonment: Form Analysis
- Individual Visits: Replay
- Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
- Post-launch usability testing: Are my designs working?
- Conversion optimization: why aren’t conversions as good as they should be?
- Helpdesk support: Why is this visitor having issues?
- Incident diagnosis: Why is this problem happening?
- Test case creation: What steps are needed to test the app?
- Dispute resolution: How do I prove it’s not my fault?
- Retroactive Segmentation: Answering “What If?”
- Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
- Implementing WIA
- 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
- Web Interaction Analytics Maturity Model
- 7. Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer
- The Travel Industry’s Dilemma
- They Aren’t Doing What You Think They Are
- What VOC Is
- What VOC Isn’t
- Four Ways to Understand Users
- Kicking Off a VOC Program
- Planning the Study
- The Kinds of Questions to Ask
- Designing the Study’s Navigation
- Why Surveys Fail
- Don’t ask for frequency of visits
- Don’t ask about subscription rates
- Don’t ask what they just did
- Don’t use VOC to determine web performance
- Don’t ask about loyalty
- Don’t ask for demographic data that you can get from other sources
- Don’t ask questions they can’t answer
- Don’t ask too many questions
- Don’t ask a question that won’t reveal anything
- Always give visitors an out
- Discourage lingering
- Provide room for subjective feedback when no answer applies
- Integrating VOC into Your Website
- Trying the Study
- Choosing Respondents
- Deciding Who to Ask
- Encouraging Participation
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- III. Web Performance and End User Experience
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- What’s User Experience? What’s Not?
- The Anatomy of a Web Session
- Wrinkles: Why It’s Not Always That Easy
- DNS Latency
- Multiple Possible Sources
- Slow Networks
- Fiddling with Things: The Load Balancer
- Server Issues
- Server OS: Handling networking functions
- Web service: Presentation layer, file retrieval
- Dynamic tier: Application logic
- Storage tier: Data, state persistence
- Third-party components: Web services, transaction processing
- Permissions and authentication
- The relationship between workload and performance
- The end result: Wide ranges of server responsiveness
- Client Issues
- Other Factors
- Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools
- Places and Tasks in User Experience
- Conclusions
- 9. Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
- Monitoring Inside the Network
- Monitoring from Outside the Network
- Different Tests for Different Tiers
- Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing
- Configuring Synthetic Tests
- Aggregation and Visualization
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model
- 10. Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring
- RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side
- How We Use RUM
- Capturing End User Experience
- Deciding How to Collect RUM Data
- RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views
- RUM Concerns and Trends
- Real User Monitoring Maturity Model
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- IV. Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors
- 12. Why Care About Communities?
- 13. The Anatomy of a Conversation
- The Participants: Who’s Talking?
- The Topics: What Are They Talking About?
- The Places: Where Are They Talking?
- 14. Tracking and Responding
- Searching a Community
- Joining a Community
- Moderating a Community
- Running a Community
- Putting It All Together
- Measuring Communities and Outcomes
- Reporting the Data
- Responding to the Community
- Community Listening Platforms
- Community Monitoring Maturity Model
- 15. Internally Focused Communities
- 16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
- Watching Competitors’ Sites
- Do I Have Competitors I Don’t Know About?
- Are They Getting More Traffic?
- Do They Have a Better Reputation?
- Are Their Sites Healthier Than Mine?
- Is Their Marketing and Branding Working Better?
- Are Their Sites Easier to Use or Better Designed?
- Have They Made Changes I Can Use?
- Preparing a Competitive Report
- Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model
- V. Putting It All Together
- 17. Putting It All Together
- 18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring
- A. KPIs for the Four Types of Site
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Collaborative Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to SaaS Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Index
- Colophon
VOC technology is deceptively straightforward: ask your visitors questions and analyze the results. Below the surface, however, those questions are the result of a process of research and planning, sample selection, invitation, clustering, segmentation, and reporting.
There are four ways to understand the voice of your customers, as shown in Figure 7-11.
- Focus groups
A moderator guides discussion among several topics with a sample of the target market. These provide a great way to understand a customer base that’s readily available. Focus groups let you see nonverbal cues, and a skilled moderator can steer the conversation in new directions you may not have considered, based on the participants’ feedback.
- Online surveys
This is what most people mean when they talk about VOC. Visitors are intercepted during their visits and are asked if they will participate in a survey. While not as open-ended as a focus group, online surveys allow you to solicit feedback from hundreds of participants who are familiar with the actual website experience.
- Usability analysis
This involves watching a participant as she uses the site. This borders on web interaction analytics (WIA) and may even include eye tracking and other tools to understand how people use a site. Usability analysts often record participants’ faces and voices during the session and encourage them to provide feedback.
- Recruited research panel services
These combine VOC surveys with interaction capture and run studies across a recruited panel that may include hundreds of users. Participants download a plug-in that tracks their online experiences and occasionally asks them questions related to the site as they surf. While more costly and invasive than simple surveys, this approach allows a much better integration of what users did with why they did it.
The approach you choose depends on how many respondents you want to survey and on whether you want simple answers or a more in-depth understanding of their experiences as they browse the site.
All site operators should do focus group studies and in-person usability testing. All you need is patience, an observant eye, an open mind, and a belief that the only thing that matters is the user’s opinion. When you want to survey a wider cross-section of the market, however, you need to look to VOC solutions, and in particular, online surveys.
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