I joined iPerceptions back in mid 2005. At the time, I had spent the prior 10 years or so building round one (Web 1.0 – hate the term) of the Internet. My career started in 1996 where I built one of the first vertically integrated web development shops in Canada (eventually sold to a larger competitor and went to work with them). It was a time when companies knew they needed an online presence they just had no idea why. The upper hand came from having a strong understanding of how brands could leverage this new digital platform. It was all about strategy. My focus then was on two things; community, and audience / site measurement. This was our niche. When I met the team at iPerceptions, it was a natural fit. I was drawn to the ‘voice of customer’ space. Things were quite different then, both with the company, and the web analytics industry in general. The timing however was perfect, and the past four years have been incredibly empowering.

For starters, iPerceptions has quintupled (5x) in staff over the past four years. Today, iPerceptions has offices in Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, New York and London. Growth spurt is an understatement. 



When I joined the company, I came in wearing a ‘senior account exec’ hat. Back then, voice of customer solutions were very much a ‘missionary sale’. People didn’t know what to do with our data, let alone know where we fit inside their organization.

Today, progressive companies embrace voice of customer at the highest strategic levels. Marketing and research teams are being re-organized to analyze and interpret customer feedback as a primary data source. Organizations are hiring experts in customer insight, and entire departments are being devoted to the customer experience. A real paradigm shift.

In 2005, the Web Analytics Association ‘discouraged’ our membership application, as the industry didn’t recognize what we did as web analytics practice.

Today, the Web Analytics Association is growing leaps and bounds with VoC professionals and sponsors who have helped to bring customer experience and feedback to the forefront of the industry. The site is even running our 4Q Website Survey as a way to capture visitor experience data on their own website.

When I first joined the company, we had one main competitor with whom we fought for most of this emerging market. Today, there are handfuls of good voice of customer providers, each with their own set of strengths and unique value propositions. 

Back then, the only sentiment / attitudinal based metric people cared about (those who knew they needed something more than clicks and path) was ‘satisfaction’.

Today, more and more progressive companies understand the need for other, more telling outcomes (intent, task completion, next steps, referral etc).

So much has changed around us in this industry, that I could probably write forever…but I have new challenges to take on (both personal and professional). All this change does one thing for sure, it begs the question of what changes lie ahead. One thing for certain, change is a foot. 


I have watched and personally contributed to the growth of this industry. It has been truly amazing to work with some of the people and brands that iPerceptions has allowed for.

If I look back over the past 15 years of my career in the web industry, it truly has been a natural evolution of both the internet as a channel for customer empowerment, and my own professional development as a digital marketer.

We will look back in a hundred years at the past 15, and we will realize that it represents a very small blip in the overall paradigm shift. I fundamentally believe that we are only just beginning to define what the web means, and I am excited for what comes next.

As for me, I’m off to do my ‘stupid passion thing’. 
I will still be working with the team at iPerceptions, and not swaying too far from the web analytics industry. 


I’ve had the pleasure of working with some really great people and brands over the past four years. Let’s make sure to stay in touch:

Twitter | LinkedIn | FriendFeed | Facebook

Jonathan Levitt

Why do we intercept visitors only on arrival to a website? Why is this method the only sampling option available for the 4Q online survey? Why not intercept visitors once they've clicked deeper into the site architecture--in other words, why not intercept visitors who are more loyal, more engaged?

Sound random sampling, within the context of an online survey, requires that everyone in a population (the population in this case is the total number of visitors to your site) has an equal probability of being selected. Those that spend more time on a website or visit more pages are almost unquestionably different from those that spend less time on websites or visit fewer pages. Yes, they may be your brand champions, yes they may be highly engaged, and yes it might flatter your professional ego to hear them declaim about their love for your brand, but, ultimately, a sample biased towards them will not be representative of your site population at large--it will not include all-important feedback from your bounces, your drive-by traffic, etc. Chances are, feedback from the latter group will be less positive, but it will be chock-full of low hanging fixes you can make to migrate these people from drive-by status to engaged status.

To get at that representative cross-section of your visitors base--in all its diverse, multifaceted glory--we need probability theory to be working on our side. Directional data from your highly-engaged, high-pages viewed segments certainly has a role to play, but representative sampling observations start with giving every visitor a chance to speak his/her mind, and that means we have to randomly invite 4Q online survey respondents at the only gate that everyone passes through--the front door.

The 2009 Online Measurement and Strategy Report is out and it reveals interesting trends such as growing trend in improving customer acquisition through web analytics. More interestingly, it shows a growing trend in the number of companies using Google Analytics.

While the immediate temptation is to assume that just because it’s a free application, people are only using it haphazardly, for ad-hoc exercises, analysis by Bryan Eisenberg shows that there is a shift from spending on technology to spending on staff. While the web analytics applications might be free, the investment is in the analysts and staff who are making sense of this data. In today’s economy, this seems to make a lot of sense.

On top of that, our own 4Q online survey metadata suggests that free web analytics application users are very highly engaged with the tools that they use. For example, even though the 4Q online survey is a little under 16 months old, over 40% of account holders have had their surveys in field, live and collecting, for at least 100 days.

Furthermore, we know from our own use of Google Analytics (we’re highly engaged ourselves!) that traffic to the pages that host our 4Q online reporting tools has never been higher. We’re seeing active users who are passionate about the data they collect and passionate about the results that emerge from that data.

While that may not be as enticing as spring flowers or full-throated robins, it’s pretty formidable for a free tool!

As it turns out, there may in fact be a useful linguistic approach to measuring task completion, also. An upcoming iPerceptions white paper will examine the open-text responses from thousands of online survey respondents who indicated that they did not complete their primary onsite tasks. One of the conclusions will be that there is a cyclical, staged logic to these pieces of verbatim commentary. These stages in the task completion journey can be described in terms of ways of speaking:

Intention -> Attempt -> Restriction -> Frustration -> Start again (hopefully!)

A real world example of this progression would sound like:

"I came to your website to book tickets (Intention). I tried using the booking engine (Attempt), but I got persistent error messages (Restriction). I was really upset and I'm disappointed in your website (Frustration). I'll try again later this week (Start again - you're lucky if you get this one!)."

As the white paper will show, these patterns repeat themselves across verbatim comments with a high degree of consistency. Perhaps this is a key, then, that will open up the ability to measure task completion outside the purview of online surveys--in places where open-text data occurs organically, places like social networks, user forums, call-center recordings, even buzz on the street.

Stay tuned for this upcoming white paper. The findings promise to be quite exciting!

For the past decade online marketers have focused on a single metric, almost to the exclusion of all others: conversion. They've implemented costly Web analytics systems, spent hours optimizing the "conversion funnel" to get more people to the shopping cart, and, above all, have focused on getting as many people to complete a purchase as possible. But conversion rates among leading retailers still hover around 2 to 3 percent.

It's time to ditch the idea that conversion is the be-all and end-all of online marketing success. The fact is, not everyone comes to your site looking to buy something. Recent research shows that 84 percent of website visitors are not there to make a purchase; instead, they are looking to obtain information, compare prices, browse products, find out a store location or store hours, get product support, or simply look at pictures and watch videos. That's why the real measure of marketing success is not hard conversion, but task completion. Make no mistake about it: If your site visitors aren't able to complete the tasks they set out to do, they won't consider purchasing from you again, either online or in-store.

Let's look at the numbers. Recently iPerceptions conducted a study of 50,000 online consumers. Just 16 percent of respondents said they visit an e-commerce website with the intention of buying something; the others are there to complete other tasks.

Consequently, every e-commerce site needs to get real feedback from actual visitors to get answers to four essential questions:

What are my visitors at my website to do?
Are they completing what they set out to do?
If not, why not?
How satisfied are my visitors?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, and are spending serious money on technologies and teams to move the dial on your conversion rate, you're making a big mistake. Fundamentally, you are not optimizing your website for the other 84 percent (or 98 percent as is often the case, given a conversion rate of 2 percent) of people who come to your site to do something other than buy things. Find out what they want and then give it to them: information, price comparison, ratings and reviews, store locations, blogs and videos, etc. And then, when they come back to your site a second, third, fourth, or fifth time, continue to give them what they want—until they are finally ready to make a purchase.

The other reason online conversion alone is a poor measure of marketing success is that it doesn't take into account customer satisfaction as a driver of in-store or future purchases. But if you measure task completion, you can know with certainty whether your customers are satisfied—even those who never planned to buy something on your site. Task completion has been proven time and again to be highly predictive of visitor satisfaction.

Satisfied customers who complete their primary tasks buy more, that's a fact borne out by the recent survey responses of 10,000 online customers. Visitors who completed their primary purposes were twice as likely to make a repeat visit, while 67 percent of these "task completers" reported enhanced brand opinion (versus only 18 percent for those who did not complete their intended tasks). Additionally, 60 percent of "task completers" reported a higher future likelihood to purchase either online or offline (versus only 14 percent for those who did not).

Measuring task completion also lets you find out whether the people who are at your site to buy actually do end up buying something—which is a much more valuable metric to have than just knowing how many people end up purchasing an item. In the survey cited above, we found that only half of visitors who go to a site with a distinct intent to buy products end up completing their tasks. That means half of the visitors with a clear intent to buy walk away because sites aren't delivering what they wanted. That's a sobering number.

If you aren't focusing on finding out what tasks your visitors want to accomplish, and then delivering the tools and information they need to complete those tasks, you are missing out on countless sales opportunities. Give conversion a break, and focus on getting your task completion rates above the e-commerce industry average of 68 percent. With tons of satisfied site visitors, those conversion rates will spike after all.

This post is a mini-addendum to last week's 5 reasons post.

Online survey users often ask us to identify when task completion is the most appropriate measure of success for their diverse visitor segments. Is it most appropriate for buyers? Browsers? The truth is that task completion is always a very powerful measure of success, no matter what task a website visitor is seeking to accomplish, but the stats prove that it is an especially powerful predictor of loyalty for first time visitors with very focused patterns of intent.

When we studied the impact of task completion on visitor loyalty, the coefficient of determination rose as visit frequency decreased and tasks got more and more focused. The reasons underpinning this are pretty simple. By virtue of their familiarity with site navigation and overall usability, repeat visitors might have an easier time accomplishing tasks than newbies. At the same time, because they've been their before, they might be slightly more tolerant of visit hurdles than newbies. For newbies, conversely, the reality is different: a lousy first site experience will be an unpardonable offense more often than not.

Visit frequency is the first layer of the progression. The second layer is specificity of task. We've done the math and it shows that task completion explains a very significant proportion of the variation in loyalty scores among visitors seeking to complete very specific tasks. This makes intuitive sense. Imagine a person who visits a website to complete a very specific task--say, to purchase a Dell Inspiron Mini. For that individual, the success of the visit will hinge on whether or not they are able to complete their very focused mission. The answer to that question will weigh heavily in their loyalty calculus. When the task is less focused or specific, however, its importance in the loyalty calculus decreases somewhat. If you've clicked over to Huffington Post and your intent is to browse today's headlines and you're not really looking for any content in specific, the notion of completing a pre-set task doesn't enter as impact-fully into calculations of visit success.

So, when you're looking for that perfect online survey metric, keep your visitor intent segments in mind. Task completion is a powerful metric in all cases, but it's an especially cogent metric for your focused newbies.

In the case of the abandoned shopping cart vs. mankind, we all plead guilty.
We’ve all done it before, both on and offline. We’ve all left her cold and lonely in the middle of an aisle, or simply quit in the middle of an online transaction. Shame on us? Well, not really.

As it turns out, online and offline shopping cart abandonment occurs for pretty much the same reasons- long checkout processes, unclear prices, and insufficient information. The average attention span of an Internet user is about 8 seconds. This makes my 5-year-old son more focused and thus more likely to buy than the average person… bad news for my credit card!

There are so many reasons why we fill up online shopping carts without ever having the intention to purchase in the first place. For most shopping sites, it seems like the only way to add up prices of items, check shipping costs and taxes, or simply compile everything you like in one place is by adding it to the shopping cart. Once you’ve gathered whatever information you were looking for, that’s when you commit your abandonment crime.

For e-commerce websites, it has never been more important to measure intent and task completion. A simple online survey software can help you answer questions about why visitors come to your website and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. These answers will not only provide you with insight to predict future behavior, but will also allow you to pinpoint areas that require change or improvement.

Take 4Qsurvey.com. Our primary goal is the account sign-up (not transactional, but just as well). According to Google Analytics, our conversion rate has fluctuated between 3% and 4%, which would appear as though between 96% and 97% of visitors are “abandoning.” In reality, however, only 15% (on average) of our visitors are onsite to actually create an account. Everyone else is “pre-transactional.” The task completion rate for visitors who are onsite to create an account averages out at 84%. This means that the real conversion abandonment figure stands at only 16%.
Looks like marketers should stop obsessing about completed transactions and start shifting their focus to pre (and post) -transactional behavior.

Every single iPerceptions online survey captures visitor task completion. You might wonder why we’re so married to this metric that we feature it in every piece of research we do. Here are five reasons why you need to be measuring visitor task completion and tapping into customer driven optimization:

1) Task completion is THE hard conversion metric for visitors who are not onsite to buy. If you are selling online, survey results consistently show that only 20% of your visitors are onsite with the distinct intent to buy. Sure, you can measure success among this segment using transactional conversion, but what about the others? Task completion quantifies visit success for the other 80%--browsers, researchers, comparison shoppers, price shoppers, blog readers, etc. Task completion measures how effectively you are pushing them down the funnel towards that crucial buying stage.

2) Task completion is a crystal ball into the future. Want to anticipate your visitors’ future online behavior? Measure online task completion. Our survey results show that task completion is a powerful predictor of visit loyalty, brand opinion, and anticipated purchasing behavior--all leading indicators of a customer's long-term commitment to your brand. The crucial finding here is that 60% of visitors who complete their tasks report a higher future likelihood to purchase, versus only 14% for those who do not complete their tasks.

3) Even if you don’t sell online, task completion can function as an extremely powerful predictor of future offline conversion. Data from webValidator online surveys running for durable goods retailers who do not sell online show that visitors who complete their onsite tasks (browsing, researching, viewing visuals, etc.) are significantly more likely to express higher offline purchasing likelihood than visitors who don't complete their primary onsite tasks.

4) Make your ad inventory more attractive and empower your ads sales team with your website task completion data. webValidator survey results reveal that visitors who complete their primary onsite tasks are 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are credible. That's powerful data to have in tow if you want to justify your premium CPMs during a time of collapsing online ad spending.

5) It’s easy to get started with task completion. No complicated formulas, heuristics, or algorithms. No esoteric weighting systems. No specious and conflicting body of "academic" justification. Just a simple “yes” or “no” question that can be collected using a free online survey like 4Q. It’s a metric that holds marketers to account from day one. No hiding behind fuzzy definitions of satisfaction or engagement—instead, task completion is a simple, cut-and-dry barometer of visit success.

In the wake of the depressing ad revenue figures put out last week by the IAB, here's some cheerful news for sellers of online advertising.

Visitors who complete their onsite tasks tend to be far more positively disposed towards the ads that they see. This comes directly from real survey results for media/publishing clients currently running iPerceptions' webValidator Continuous Listening Solution. Our data showed that visitors who completed their primary onsite tasks were 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward in the ads they saw were relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward were credible (see tables). This phenomenon was particularly acute among the valuable yet increasingly scarce segment of visitors in the $100k + annual household income bracket.

Since the relevance and credibility of online advertising units are traditionally two big predictors of clickability and recall, the implications for both buyers and sellers of online advertising are huge. This is a life line to sellers in a time of crumbling CPMs. Sellers now have a clear interest in optimizing their websites to boost task completion, a process that will make their ad inventory that much more salable. On the flip side, ad buyers will need to keep an eye out on publishers' website task completion scores to maximize the ROI of their spend.

Specifically, the total number of nights spent in hotels each year dropped from an average of 18.1 in Q1 2008 to an average of 17.1 in Q1 2009, a fall of 6%. Among business travelers, the average nights fell from 27.2 in Q1 2008 down to 25.3 in Q1 2009, representing a 7% dip

This confirms findings we released in our Q1 2009 Hospitality Industry Report. These latest results are also consistent with recent findings by Harris Interactive on the recession's impact on travel behavior. In the Harris study, 27% of people surveyed indicated that they would decrease the duration of upcoming leisure trips, while 61% of people surveyed confessed that their companies had altered their travel plans in the last 12 months.

In the face of these adverse tides, the margin of error for marketers in the hotel sector decreases exponentially. One piece of advice I can offer: dig into your open-ended survey data and distill those top visitor pain points. Then, take action. As the old adage goes: he who hesitates is lost.

As it turns out, however, task completion can function as an extremely powerful predictor of future offline conversion. Data from webValidator website surveys running for durable goods retailers who do not sell online (and where the websites are essentially glorified product catalogs) illustrate this point. Visitors who complete their onsite tasks (browsing, researching, viewing visuals, etc.) are significantly more likely to express higher offline purchasing likelihood than visitors who don't complete their primary tasks. The trend is especially pronounced among visitors who are deep into their purchasing cycles (see table).

So, even if you don't sell online, keep an eye on your task completion numbers. As you get better at creating effective and successful visit experiences, you'll drive more people to your store and your bottom lines will growth in a very healthy fashion.

As much as online retailers focus on driving visitors to the shopping cart, the reality is the majority of consumers don’t visit websites with the clear objective of making a purchase. Study after study done on real survey data has shown that over 80% of visitors to retail and e-commerce websites are not onsite to buy. Instead, they’re onsite to browse, learn, research, comparison shop, check prices, or complete a plethora of other tasks.

So in the quest to boost conversion, maybe it’s time to do something counter-intuitive: stop focusing on the shopping cart. Instead, you need to start figuring out exactly what your visitors are on your site to do, so you can deliver what they want, when they want it, and thereby nudge them down the purchase consideration funnel.

How do you find out what visitors hope to accomplish on your site? Ask them. Simple online surveys, using as little as four quick questions, are the best way to find out the real intent of your customers. No amount of behavioral analysis, click tracking, or user-generated content monitoring is going to deliver the same level of insight as pure voice of customer feedback.

What’s Your Intent?

In today’s economy, when consumers are worried about their jobs, their homes, and their credit, visitors are understandably reluctant to hit the “buy” button. Their buying cycles are longer; whereas, in the past they may have bought on their first visit to your website, now it’s taking two, three, or maybe even four visits to persuade them to part with their hard-earned cash. Using surveys to capture visitor intent will allow you to pinpoint exactly where they are in their decision making process. Are they mystified by your shipping policy? Are they hung up on features and functions? Are they worried they can get your product cheaper elsewhere? By measuring intent, you can deliver the exact information or service visitors are looking for at that time, which means that they will be much more likely to come back to your site or visit one of your stores to complete a purchase.

To clearly understand visitor intent, online retailers really only need to ask visitors one main question: “What is the purpose of your visit today?” You can offer answer choices such as: browse product information, compare prices, look up a store location, get a customer service phone number, or read customer product reviews.

Once you’ve successfully identified visitor intent, you can take it one step further by asking: “Were you or were you not able to complete that task?” and “Tell us why”. These are the main questions used by thousands of online companies who use our free 4Q survey, which takes two minutes to install and starts yielding meaningful insights right away. Or, you can build out a custom survey to ask your customers simple, pointed questions that give you answers to pressing customer engagement and retention questions. For example, you can ask them why they abandoned their shopping carts and you can drill down into reasons for abandonment by product line or demographic segment. What’s more, you can use surveys to ask visitors about their multichannel interactions with your company. Did they visit a store before making their online purchase? Would they prefer to complete their purchase in a local store? Ask them!

Surprising Results

During a recent site redesign, Colin Campbell, founder of Lavish & Lime, a retailer of eco-friendly and natural products, wanted to find out with precision what his customers wanted, so he could build a site that met their needs. The retailer used the free 4Q survey to query visitors about why they came to the site and whether or not they achieved their objectives. When consumers said they were not able to accomplish their goals, the survey asked why. The feedback collected from that one open-ended question helped Campbell understand his customers better than ever before, and to create a new site based on those preferences.

Many of the things people wanted to find out on the site but were unable to were things Campbell never realized were important to his customers. Environmentally-conscious shoppers who came to the site, for example, wanted to find information on the manufacturing principles associated with certain products, such as whether they contained the chemical compound Bisphenol A, or BPA. Lavish & Lime was able to design their new site with these specific customer requests in mind, and already, the new site has achieved impressive conversion results.

Beyond Measuring Conversion

Online retailers get so hung up on conversion that they fail to measure the impact of all the brand interactions that lead up to the buying event. While surveys can do a great job in telling you why buyers abandoned the shopping cart, most of your visitors are not actually onsite to buy. Obsessing about conversion means that you will be turning a dangerously blind eye to all the pre-buying tasks that your visitors are setting out to accomplish.

Rather than making assumptions about why your visitors are onsite, use survey-powered metrics like visitor intent and task completion to find out for sure. Then you can optimize your website for every stage in the buying cycle, from product descriptions all the way through to the shopping cart. There is simply no better way to find out where the purchase process is breaking down, and how to fix it.

According to the case study, Gem Affair used their 4Q survey data to identify four key online priorities to take action on:

- Adding ring sizing
- Preparing to offer engraving
- Fix JavaScript problems that were slowing load times
- Cancel site navigation overhaul

Gem Affair saw lift in three key areas as a result of taking these steps. First, they were able to boost the overall conversion by a "pretty huge" margin after fixing the website’s JavaScript problem. Second, they saw a 4.5% lift in the sale of rings with the sizing option, compared to rings without sizing, year over year. And finally, their overall customer satisfaction score jumped by 7 percentage points (from 77% to 84%) since they started the survey and began implementing the changes.

Congratulations to Gem Affair on this great 4Q survey success story!

iPerceptions’ voice of customer solutions begin with a fundamental understanding of visitor intent. To date, conversion has been the most ubiquitous web analytics metric, but it has distorted the analytics picture by assuming that all visitors are onsite to fulfill transactional tasks. This is simply not the case, as a recent analysis showed that over 80% of visitors log onto websites to fulfill non-transactional tasks.

While you have a desired list of outcomes for your website, your visitors have their own distinct set of tasks that they are looking to accomplish. Matching intent to outcomes is the holy grail of online marketing, and measuring visitor task completion will provide you with concrete evidence of how efficiently your site is bridging this divide. Task completion ties back to hard actions taken by visitors and forms the basis of true site accountability. While respondents can be more forgiving when reporting their satisfaction with a website or their loyalty patterns, when they are asked about task completion, it's a cut-and-dry equation--they either completed their tasks or they didn't.

In a time of unprecedented economic upheaval, where growth in all channels—online included—is abating and consumer confidence is sinking, it is crucial to know which metrics link back directly to healthy business outcomes, and which tie directly to behavior. A recent iPerceptions study of over 100,000 respondents to online retail websites demonstrated the significant benefits that task completion improvement can yield to website operators. 67% of visitors who completed their primary tasks reported enhanced brand opinion (vs. only 18% for those who do not). Additionally, 60% of visitors who completed their tasks reported a higher future likelihood to purchase either online or offline (vs. only 14% for those who do not).

By focusing on visitor intent and leveraging iPerceptions’ powerful diagnostic tools and analytical support, you will be tapping into a research approach that has consistently yielded proven online conversion and customer retention uplift, as well as sizable operating cost reductions.