In the January 2010 WeBenchmark survey of B2B software websites, 27% of visitors across all participating websites stated upon exiting that they with today's visit had experienced little or no success.
How is your website performing?
Sign up for a free trial of the WeBenchmark Website Effectiveness Survey Program to learn how your website is performing, discover what you can do to improve your website, and unlock the potential of more successful visitors.FeedbackMetrics today launched WeBenchmark.com, a new on-demand survey and benchmark service committed to businesses' website effectiveness.
The new and unparalleled survey and benchmark service enables any business, regardless of size and budget, to measure, benchmark and act on its website effectiveness.
"Today many companies run a website effectiveness survey program as it enables them to improve their websites by listening to visitors. What WeBenchmark.com offers is a survey and benchmark service enabling companies not only to analyze their recent results and trend data, but also compare their websites to the results of their industry week by week," says Kjell Oksendal, CEO of FeedbackMetrics.
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Too many marketers and website owners have experienced it: The uphill struggle to convince management to approve budget for a new website or a major revamp of the existing one.
The challenge is often that when measuring the success of a website, management focus on transactional metrics, such as:
Why invest in a new website when all these metrics are showing growth?
Two reasons:
The solution is to implement a website effectiveness survey that not only measures visitors' success and loyalty, but also benchmarks your data with the industry average. Such an on-going research program gives you great insight into:
Provided with insight also to attitudinal metrics, management are in a much better position to invest intelligently and timely in your website.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The challenge is that some objectives are easier to measure than others. And some are easier to measure short-term than long-term. Measuring traffic and leads are fairly straightforward short-term, while engagement, loyalty and revenue (depending on your business) take longer time.
One of the best ways to measure success and give you immediate results is a website effectiveness survey.
A typical website effectiveness program consists of a success metric (e.g. "To what extent have you successfully completed your visit") and a loyalty metric (e.g. "To what extent is it likely that you will revisit the website" and "To what extent is it likely that you will recommend the website to a friend / colleague"). These metrics combined tell you how effective your website is. From, importantly, visitors' perspectives.
Implemented on both your existing and future websites, a website effectiveness survey is a great tool to measure the success of your new website. And benchmarked with industry data, you can also tell how your website is performing compared to your industry.
If you are responsible for managing your business' website, chances are high that you use visitor behavioral data (e.g. collected by Google Analytics) to measure your website performance, and ultimately, the return of your website. Visitor behavioral data is great when reporting on unique visitors, page hits, traffic sources, navigation, exit pages, etc., and very useful when wanting to improve visitors' experience in terms of e.g. number of clicks needed to complete an operation.
But reliance on visitors behavioural data fails when trying to measure (and improve) the effectiveness of a website. The effectiveness of a website is based on visitors' success when trying to fulfill the objective(s) at mind when visiting the website. And while visitors' success might be revealed using behavioral data (e.g. did the visitor go through with the purchase), this can at best only be speculative as behavioural data cannot provide you with visitors' various objectives in the first place.
True measurement of website effectiveness should be based on visitor attitudinal data obtained via a web survey when visitors are on your website. In general businesses choose one of the following strategies when implementing a website effectiveness program:
We recommend strategy 3 as comparative data - both trend and industry benchmark - are crucial when determining how effective your website is.
How effective is your website compared to other vendors within your own software industry?
Note that all surveys and reports are anonymous. Your company name is never displayed in any benchmark report or visible outside of your portal.
Visit Software Industry WebSite Effectiveness Benchmark to read about the program and to register for participation!
As reported by Gartner*, "Feedback management technologies will be the top investment made in 2009 to improve customer experience.”
Businesses invest in Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) to manage customer experience on two levels:
In both instances, the potential return on a business' EFM initiatives is linked to feedback trends: Are our customers more satisfied now than previously?
Typically, businesses measure and act on customer feedback, and use trend data to validate customer experience improvements.
But as businesses rely only on their own in-house trend data, have they really unleashed the true potential of their efforts to improve? How can they know that their own isolated performance is a good one?
In our view, it is essential that companies not only rely on trend data to gauge improvements, but also compare their own data with industry feedback benchmark data. Analyzing its own isolated trend data, a company may improve its customer experience, but still be way behind its competitors.
* Gartner, Inc. "Predicts 2009: CRM Customer Service and Support" by Jim Davies, November 10, 2008.
