How to Use Qualitative Web Analytics

Web analytics measures how visitors reach and interact with your website. It is popular and important to measure quantitative data such as the number of visitors to your site. Google Analytics and most other web analytics packages focus on this aspect.

Yet qualitative data is often neglected. It can be collected through surveys, feedback forms, direct, and online social interaction. It tells you so much about your visitors that quantitative web analytics cannot. If you don’t collect it and use it to optimize your website, you are missing a big opportunity.

So how do you measure and use qualitative web analytics?

How To Obtain Qualitative Feedback

Most web analytics packages don’t have qualitative feedback measurement integrated. There are four ways to obtain qualitative feedback about your website:

1. Contact Forms

It is important to make your contact forms short and specific. Keeping them brief will create more feedback responses. They should ask specific questions that are important to your website. Placing contact forms specific to feedback about a certain topic or page is a good tactic to use.

2. Automated Tools
Several tools allow you to specify and tailor how you collect feedback on your website. These can be embedded surveys, or even packages integrated with web analytics. Kampyle lets you customize a feedback widget for your site that is integrated with web analytics and is quite appealing. It has integrated web analytics with website feedback, a big step in the evolution of web analytics. UserVoice is also a good way to get customer feedback.

3. Social Media

People are usually happy to offer their feedback and advice if you ask them directly. Using social channels for feedback such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook gives you another perspective on what people think. Make your request specific and personal. Create a landing page that is also specific to your request, to drive more feedback.

4. Direct Interaction

Web analytics shouldn’t be just data collected from the internet. Feedback from real life interaction can be combined with that collected online to get a complete picture. You can also get a lot more detailed feedback with a direct approach.

Using Qualitative Data to Improve your Website

So how do you use qualitative data to further your website objectives? Here are the steps:

1. Collection / Measurement

Decide what channels you are going to use to collect feedback. This should be a combination of the direct and online channels described above. The more specific your request for feedback is, the more actionable it will be.

2. Segmentation
Hopefully you will be getting lots of qualitative data. You should segment and categorize this data to identify trends you can act upon. Break down the feedback into as many levels as you need to.

The Qualitative Data Advantage

There is little guess work and interpretation involved with qualitative data such as feedback. This is a huge advantage over quantitative data where random and interpretation error is much higher. You can be more confident in the accuracy of qualitative data, and achieve more detailed insights into how to improve from it.

Conclusion

Adding feedback measurement and qualitative data to your web analytics strategy should not be overlooked. A complete and effective web analytics strategy includes measuring and using both quantitative and qualitative data to drive your goals. Without qualitative web analytics, you are only seeing half the picture.