How To Use On-Site Surveys to Increase Conversions

by Alex Birkett December 1, 2015
December 1, 2015

Show a landing page to a panel of experts and ask them what’s wrong with it – everyone will have an answer. Oh yes, everyone will have an answer.


But how cohesive are these answers? How accurate? How actionable?


Turns out, even if the panel consists of experts, opinions still aren’t worth the weight of solid research.


And on-page surveys can be crucial to deriving insights for conversion optimization.


On-Site Surveys Defined

I wrote an article awhile back about customer surveys, and while both types of surveys fall under the broad category of ‘qualitative research,’ on-page surveys are different in their goals and execution.


While customer surveys ask questions from people who bought something from your site (your current or past customers), on-page web surveys ask questions from people while they’re on your site (could be a variety of different segments).


In conversion research, the big goal is still the same with the two types. You’re trying to identify sources of friction. On-page surveys provide an interesting look at this, because, as opposed to asking about past experiences, you’re getting their feedback as they’re experiencing your site.


Web & exit surveys are kind of pop-up boxes that appear to the visitor based on certain rules – like time spent on site, number of pages visited, activity (e.g. moves the mouse cursor next to the browser window closing X). This is what they look like:


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What Can You Learn With On-Site Surveys?


We can learn a lot with on-site surveys. For instance, we can:



  • Uncover UX issues
  • Locate process bottlenecks
  • Understand root causes of abandonment
  • Distinguish visitor segments whose different motivations for similar on-site activity are undetected by analytics
  • Identify demand for new products or improvements to existing products
  • Figure out who the customer is, feeding into accurate customer personas.
  • Decipher what their intent is. What are they trying to achieve? How can we help them do that?
  • Find out how they shop (comparison to competitors, which benefits they seek, what words they use, etc)

Most of all, however, we’re seeking to learn where the friction occurs in the purchasing process. What fears do they have about handing over their credit card number? What doubts do they still have about your product? What’s stopping them from buying – emotionally, functionally or otherwise?


Note: there are other things you can learn from on-site surveys, of course, like NPS. There are tons of good articles on those other purposes, so we’ll just focus on the conversion research side of things.


Using On-Site Surveys To Remove Friction, Increase Conversions

On-site surveys are critical for conversion research. Here’s how Dustin Drees, optimization consultant, put it:


“dustinDustin Drees:


“On-page surveys are great for in-the-moment feedback, which means they’re well suited for pages in your conversion path that underperform. What are the key pages on your site with a high exit percentage? What questions do you need to ask to understand why visitors are dropping off on these pages? You can use these insights to inform your test hypotheses later.”


Take, for example, this case study that Optimizely wrote up on Teespring. Teespring collected qualitative feedback in a variety of ways, including customer surveys, live chat and on-site surveys. Through their research, they discovered that credibility was an issue. Especially because Teespring has an unconventional commerce model (they only ship the shirts once the minimum order size is hit), they needed to bake in extra trust.


Image Source


When conducting user surveys and collecting feedback, they heard anecdotes like: “Not sure if I should give my credit card information,” and, “Not sure if I’ll get my shirt.”


With this in mind, the team set up a test betweentwo CTAs. The original:


Image Source


And the variation:


Image SourceImage(s) Source


The subtle change in the variation microcopy ended up increasing conversions by an impressive 12.7%.


Voice of Customer Research Using On-Site Surveys


Another inspiring example comes from our own blog – a case study by Jen Havice and Dustin Drees. In doing conversion research for LearnVisualStudio.NET, they discovered that a vast amount (almost 2/3) of respondents considered themselves beginners, and 69.74% of respondents said they were “most interested in finding their first developer job.”


They tooks these insights to form a basic copy experiment. Here’s the original:


lvs-first-original-568x327 (1)


The variation:


LVS-original-home-page-563x426


By simply telling visitors who the lessons are designed for (and where the lessons will get them), conversions increased on the Courses (+9.2%), Plans and Pricing (+24%), and Curriculum (+23.9%).


They then dug deeper into the survey responses and made a few more changes (below the fold copy, CTA, headline, etc), and their variation ended up outperforming the original on the main call to action button above the fold by 66.3%. All primarily fueled by VOC insights from on-site surveys.


Before Anything Else, Define Your Objectives

The effectiveness of your on-site survey strategy hinges on clearly defined business objectives. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.


So begin with the end in mind. What goals do you want to achieve? Be specific. As KISSMetrics put it:


“An open-ended statement like “to find out what my customers want” isn’t a concrete goal, because the answers could be all over the map. Questions without a clear objective also make it impossible to create a prioritized list for your team or developers to focus on.”


Dustin Drees factually considers a lack of clear focus as the largest mistake you can make with on-page surveys. Starting with no clear goal compounds the inefficiency of the surveys:


Dustin Drees:


“This is the biggest mistake I see people making with on-page surveys is not having a clear focus on what knowledge they’re seeking with their research. This is a problem because it will create the more common mistakes; asking questions that are too broad in their scope to lead to actionable insights, presenting questions at the wrong time, over-surveying by asking the same question on every page, or asking the wrong questions completely.


Have a clear focus on the reasons for running your survey, so you can identify the right visitors to ask, in the right spots and at the right time.”


When to Pop the Question?

Since you can target when and to whom you’re showing the on-site survey, keep in mind two things when deciding:



  1. Qualifying the visitor (is this a random visitor or someone actually considering purchasing?)
  2. Asking the right question at the right time (e.g. if you ask someone why they didn’t buy right when they land at the site, there will be lots of friction and confusion, and zero insight gained).

Look at your average time on site and page views per person metrics: ask question from people who have above average engagement (for qualification reasons). One heuristic to follow is to target people just above the average engagement. That way, you’re getting users at least in consideration of a purchase.


Ask the right question on the right page. Don’t ask anything about buying on the home page. Rather, ask that during the checkout funnel. Don’t ask, “why are you here today?” during the checkout. You get the picture.


Which Questions to Ask?

Avinash Kaushik once wrote about the “three greatest survey questions ever.” The story is that, when asked which analytics tool he’d recommend to a VP on a short time frame, he answered that she should not install an analytics tool. Instead, install an on-site survey and ask these three questions:



  • What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
  • Were you able to complete your task today?
  • If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

He then explained more about web survey strategy in another article, explaining that the greatest wisdom is to be gained from open-ended questions:


AvinashAvinash Kaushik


“Any good survey consists of most questions that respondents rate on a scale and sometimes a question or two that is open ended. This leads to a proportional amount of attention to be paid during analysis on computing Averages and Medians and Totals. The greatest nuggets of insights are in open ended questions because it is Voice of the Customer speaking directly to you (not cookies and shopper_ids but customers).


Questions such as: What task were you not able to complete today on our website? If you came to purchase but did not, why not?


Use the quantitative analysis to find pockets of “customer discontent”, but read the open ended responses to add color to the numbers. Remember your Director’s and VP’s can argue with numbers and brush them aside, but few can ignore the actual words of our customers. Deploy this weapon.”


That said, depending on your strategy, there are many more questions that can bring insight than those three. Think about trying to answer two categories of questions, in general:



  1. Why did they come to the site? Does our site match their needs? If not, are we attracting the wrong traffic? Or is there an opportunity here we aren’t capitalizing upon?
  2. What are the sources of friction? This is more specific that “why they didn’t buy” (understanding that is our main objective, but we have many goals to understand the big picture).

Examples of Questions to Ask


Here are some example questions you could ask (feel free to changing wording as necessary):



  • What’s the purpose of your visit today? (establishes user intent)
  • Why are you here today? (also established user intent)
  • Were you able to find the information you were looking for? (can identify missnoing information on the site – best asked on product pages)
  • What made you not complete the purchase today? (identifies friction – only ask this as exit survey on checkout pages, and beware that some people are still considering the purchase.)
  • Is there anything holding you back from completing a purchase? Y/N (and then ask for explanation – again, this identifies sources of friction)
  • Do you have any questions you haven’t been able to find answers to? Y/N
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