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Posted: Wed, January 17, 2007
Attitudinal analyticsby Jim Sterne Measuring clickthroughs, pageviews and revenues is revealing, but it's a bit like asking an in-store shopper how well they like your shop based on the time of day they came in, where they walked and how much they bought. Do they "like" the shop? That's a different story.
Roger refers to web analytics systems as DRIP - data-rich, information-poor. "Web analytics can, for example, tell a site manager exactly how many visitors dropped out of a checkout process and the precise points at which they quit," says Roger. "Web analytics provides little or no information, however, as to who those visitors were or why they left the process." This reflects the feelings of Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results who says, "When you read log file or sophisticated analytics reports, you surmise where to focus your attention. But when you look at actual customer comments, they'll tell you where you need work. Then use the analytics to figure out how well you're fixing the problem." "Web analytics captures no demographic information on who is coming to a site, or on why they are coming," Roger Beynon says "If a site doesn't know who's coming and why they've come, meeting visitor needs involves luck as much as design, forcing site management to make decisions on content, and redesign armed with incomplete information." Roger is not too keen on trusting surveys by themselves, either. "Visitor satisfaction surveys measure a site's effect on its visitors, but offer limited insight into the user experiences that produce the effect." For that, he submits, you have to look to click stream data since it shows where visitors went on the site, and what they did. If your survey asks questions about intent, then you can learn why they did it. Roger and Usability Sciences have come up with a way of visually reporting how people feel (like any good survey firm would) but they do it by overlaying attitudes on top of navigational data. They call the result Attitudinal Analytics. "Attitudinal analytics illuminates the entire user experience, affording clearer visibility into causality. In turn, more accurate understanding of causality makes possible the design of more accurate solutions, which lead to greater, faster improvement," says Roger. The attitudinal part of all of comes from asking people whether they were successful in accomplishing *their* goals, instead of focusing exclusively on your own (sales). Those who were happy about their website experience show up at once end of the spectrum, those who were not, at the other end. Then comes the fun part: What-if, in living colour. How did people who had successful visits get from the home page to the shopping cart? Where did the unhappy folks bail out? Where did the unhappy people get flummoxed? Of those who deemed themselves successful, how many are likely to return and buy again? How did their clickstream differ from those who were successful but said they were unlikely to return? Did the happy/successful people click on something more often than those who left unfulfilled? The next layer of detail to throw into the mix depends on the questions you ask. You can compare and contrast visitors based on demographics, dollar value, lead source, product selection, brand affinity, visit frequency and, well... you get the idea. The point is that attitudinal analytics give you a little more view into the hearts and minds of your marketplace. That's just what we've been hoping for. Jim Sterne is an internationally known consultant and speaker who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. He is the chairman of Emetrics Summit, and topics such as this will be covered at the forthcoming Emetrics Summit in London on 29 - 30 March 2007. |
Roger Beynon, Chief Strategy Officer at |
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