Website Surveys: Why You Need Them? Which Questions To Use?

To understand what’s really happening on your site, approaching an SEO agency isn’t the sole step to take – you need to talk to your users. You need to understand the kinds of needs that you can meet to know exactly how you improve your products and services to completely satisfy your audience. This is where you need to conduct website surveys or “web intercept surveys.”

Website surveys are an excellent way to know and understand how your visitors feel about their experience on your site. Surveys help you gather quantitative and qualitative data on your visitors’ experience and thoughts on your website, as well as your products and services. Questions that you need to ask in surveys should both be open-ended and close-ended. Most of all, they must not be intrusive or pushy. They need to help users gauge your site, as well as your products and services, as objectively as possible for them to be able to provide accurate answers.

Analyzing visitor feedback can help you optimize your site to improve user experience and your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, and in turn, increase rankings and boost your conversion.

What are the different types of surveys you can use?

To put it broadly, there are three types of website surveys that you can use to realize different goals, like user understanding user behavior and improving user experience.

Widget surveys

From the name itself, these are surveys that appear on the screen as a small widget in the corner of a page. They open up as a form when a visitor clicks on them. Unlike pop-up surveys, they don’t obstruct the visitors’ view, giving them the freedom to initiate the survey from their end instead of being annoyed to do it.

Popup surveys

These are surveys that pop up on a visitor’s browser when a specific condition is met. Usually, popup surveys appear anywhere throughout the customer journey.

Collapsible popup surveys

Collapsible popup surveys are a combination of widgets and popup surveys. When a condition or event is triggered, it will pop up on a user’s screen. However, it does not disappear after the user closes the screen and remains as a small widget in the corner of the page. This gives visitors enough time to decide whether they want to take part in the campaign or not.

Why do you need to conduct website surveys?

Digital marketing aside, the success of your business lies in how well you treat your customers. To fully know what your target audience wants from you, you need to have a deeper understanding of their behaviors, needs, and intents, which can be determined by website surveys.

Especially amid the current pandemic, it’s important to know how to scale customer experience in this new normal; the first step, through assessing their needs and wants.

Take a look at some of the other benefits of website surveys to online businesses like yours.

1. Real-time feedback

Website surveys can be done instantaneously, which means that feedback and responses are done in real-time. Aside from the speed with which responses are given, website surveys can also solicit more accurate answers from visitors because the experience is still fresh.

Emails, on the other hand, do not accurately capture user experiences because they are sent and answered at a later time. And because you don’t need to wait for their answers, you’ll be able to get useful insights in real-time, too, which you can use to address recurring concerns, make improvements, and enhance the overall user experience.

2. Reach out to a relevant demographic

While emails can be effective, you are only limited to a small pool of respondents, which means that you also get limited access to customer data. What’s worse is that there is no guarantee that the surveys will even reach the intended respondents.

With website surveys, your sample audience can be as big as your site’s traffic since every user that lands on your site can take part in your survey simply by being on your website. And because there’s no need to input email addresses, phone numbers, or other information, visitors who are already on your site can share their feedback about your site, as well as your products and services. This widens your surveys’ reach exponentially.

3. Get feedback wherever the customer is in the sales funnel

One of the most important benefits of website surveys is that they can be configured to set certain event triggers that will ask visitors questions based on where they are in the sales funnel. For example, visitors can be asked what they are looking for while on your homepage. You can also ask them whether they found what they were looking for while on a product page. Short questions that will help you gauge what could be stopping visitors from continuing with the customer journey can provide you useful insights that can be used to improve your marketing strategy and improve user experience.

What questions should you ask in your website surveys?

No matter the kind of website you have – whether it’s an e-commerce, SaaS (software-as-a-service), magazine/news site, or blog – conducting website surveys will give you the data you need to improve your user experience and engagement, which will increase conversions for your business.

Here are some of the questions experts recommend to ask your website visitors to get valuable insights.

Were you able to accomplish your goal on our website?

Getting mostly a “yes” answer could mean that your website is performing well and that you’re doing the right thing. Ideally, you should have more than 60% affirmative response to know whether you should make any adjustments to your website or not. Anything below that could most likely mean that you’re doing something wrong.

Did you have any difficulty finding anything?

This is one of the most important website usability survey questions you must ask your visitors. Their responses will allow you to determine whether they can easily navigate throughout your site to find what they came for in the first place. If a lot of users find it difficult to locate specific information on your site, it means that there’s a problem with its structure. This question only applies to those who have spent a good amount of time on your site.

How likely are you to refer us to your friends?

This serves as an excellent metric to gauge customer happiness. You can ask visitors questions like “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to refer us to your friends?”

Naturally, you’ll want visitors to give you a score of more than 7. Those who score between 7 and 8 are neutral about you, whereas those who give you a score of 9 or 10 feel most pleased with their experience. This is the Net Promoter Score system wherein you ask users to rate how likely they are to promote your site to their friends. The higher the score, the more likely they will do so. Ideally, the NPS system should be shown after a visitor has interacted with your site.

Is there anything missing on this page?

Users will always have expectations. To identify the discrepancies between their expectations and what they find on your site, you need to include this question in your website surveys. You’ll discover that some visitors may not like the way your site is organized or structured, which will help you reconsider its design or components to make users happy.

What do you think about our pricing?

This is an excellent question to ask if you offer pricing packages to your customers. This question will provide you with vital information that can be a basis for your pricing strategy.

What feature(s) would like us to add to our website?

A word of caution though, make sure to use due diligence when gathering the answers to this question. Some visitors might propose that you include everything on your website, which is not a good thing. It’s important that you maintain a critical eye for suggestions that actually make sense and that will really improve the overall user experience.

What are you hoping to accomplish by visiting our site?

This question is best answered with different reasons why people visit your site. This will provide you with valuable feedback that will help you improve your products, services, and website. The responses should be sorted into two categories: answers from people who expressed a clear interest in buying from you and answers from people who did not. The answers will also help you determine whether visitors are finding what they are looking for on your site or not.

What was your first impression of our products or services?

Visitors’ first impression of your brand, as well as your products or services, is one of the most important things to consider when measuring your website usability. It often gets overlooked because businesses mainly focus on the customer journey and that they are being funneled into the customer pipeline. Keep in mind that bad first impressions generally result in users leaving the site in an instant. Once you gather enough data to help you make the necessary improvements, you’ll be able to work on your website design and development, as well as in enhancing your products and services to give customers 100% satisfaction.

Is there is anything we can do to make your experience with us better?

This is one of the most effective questions you can ask in your website surveys. This question has a straightforward answer that tells you directly what you can do to make the user experience so much better.

Bottom line

Website surveys are excellent game-changers. Collecting the responses and then analyzing them will help you make the necessary adjustments to deliver brilliant experiences to every user that lands on your site.