An easy way to discover who your website visitors are

What is an online survey?

By posing the right questions, you will easily gain insight into precise visitor profiles, discover the aim of their visit and what they think of the website. There are various methods for presenting these questionnaires to the target group, for instance:

• By e-mail
• By placing a link on the site
• By placing a banner on the site
• By means of a layer (or pop-up) screen on the website

Whereas the first method enables you to pose targeted questions to persons or customers who are known within the organization, the last method enables you to question a large group of (unknown) website visitors in a short period of time. Answers are thus obtained to website-related issues, such as determining visitor profiles and user experiences and user satisfaction.

The benefits of an online survey for a corporate website

Why is an online survey so valuable specifically for a corporate website?
Recruiters usually learn what applicants think of a website through job interviews. But what deters visitors who decide not to apply? And does the company know what analysts or investors think of the corporate website? Or how the website can make life easier for journalists? Perhaps you are one of the companies that chose to publish an online annual or sustainability report. Do you have any idea to what extent this report is appreciated by your corporate stakeholders? Online surveys make it possible to answer these specific questions.

When should you utilize an online survey?

Online research helps you to make decisions and substantiate and defend subsequent research-based activities. Surveys shed light on the following subjects:

• Visitor profiles (who are your visitors?)
• Reason(s) for visiting (what are your website visitors' objectives?)
• Frequency of visits (how often do visitors visit your website, and for how long?)
• Media effectiveness (how did visitors learn about your website?)
• Degree of success (did visitors reach their goal?)
• Degree of satisfaction (how satisfied are your visitors about various aspects, such as content, user-friendliness and design?)

The subjects mentioned above are a sample of innumerable aspects to be investigated. But there is one thing that should definitely not be omitted, namely a request for visitors to submit suggestions. Experience shows that this yields many valuable pointers, comments and suggestions. Your stakeholders can tell you what they like about your website, but, more importantly, it provides them with the opportunity to express what they feel is missing or what can be improved or done differently.

New release?

It's advisable to use online surveys periodically. This is certainly necessary if the website frequently undergoes new releases. The first period thus constitutes a baseline measurement that charts the website's current profile and current appreciation (phase 1). After each new release (phases 2 and 3), the survey can be conducted live again. This enables you to compare the outcome with previous results and quickly identify whether the changes have been for the better or for the worse.

Conditions for a good online survey

• Determine your goals and expectations beforehand. Carefully consider what the reason for using an online survey is. In other words, what kind of information are you trying to obtain and for what purpose? Only ask questions that are really essential and if you clearly know what you are going to do with the results. This will prevent you from asking irrelevant questions.
• Make sure the survey isn't too long. As a rule, keep it to a maximum of 15 questions, at least two of which are open questions. Avoid long lists of answers. The choice of answers should be immediately clear to visitors. Optimal use of routing also ensures that respondents only fill in questions that really apply to them.
• Consider using the entry-exit method, in which visitors are confronted with a number of questions when entering and exiting the website. Visitors should first be asked the purpose of their visit, and then whether they have succeeded in that aim. Another option is to find out how satisfied visitors are at the end of their visit.
• Use the organization's house style in compiling the questionnaire, even if it will be developed by an external party. Consider things such as logos, colour, design, graphs, etc.

Invitation to participate, in the Wolters Kluwer house style

• Make sure you get a good response from at least 300 surveys. Online surveys enable you to distinguish between certain target-group segments. Keep in mind that at least 50 respondents per segment are needed to make an appropriate decision. If there are many different segments, this may mean that the minimum number of surveys is (a great deal) higher than 300.
• Bear in mind that not all stakeholders will be equally well represented. Experience shows, for example, that journalists often don't take the time to participate in surveys and are therefore barely represented in the results. This group therefore needs to be approached in a different way.

In short, an online survey is a useful and relatively simple tool for getting a sense of your precise target group and for developing a corporate website over the years. This, in combination with highly effective research, such as a usability test, can be a very useful way of discovering what the target group's deeper or underlying motives or attitudes are.

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