If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be?

When it comes to behavioral targeting, I believe in simple solutions and to simple solutions you get by asking the right questions.

The question: If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be? The guests: Avinash Kaushik, Joseph Carrabis and Stephane Hamel, people I look way up to when it comes to web analytics brain set. Here is how they would answer the above question:

Avinash Kaushik

Segment: The segment where I am spending the most money acquiring traffic.

Question: Why were you not able to complete your task on our website today?

(Author’s note) I love Avinash’s “simple solution – rich in value” approach. Implementing his suggestion is almost piece of cake to do with some minor help from your development team; the value you can get out of this implementation, priceless .

Joseph Carrabis

I’ve had about a day to think of this and my response hasn’t changed (and it’s probably NextStageish): I would direct my question to the segment that doesn’t achieve the site goal (bounces, non-conversions, …) and ask them “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?”

In most cases the visitor percentage goaling/converting is small (just checked FireClick. Conversions are 4.2% and cart abandonment is just over 70%). These numbers are extremely consistent with NextStage research and are due to site designs/topologies/… not being designed for the majority audience (except by accident, usually). These numbers (4.2%, 70%) demonstrate a site’s de facto audience. They’ll complete a goal/convert regardless.

I should point out that I’ve written elsewhere that NextStage has a 19% bounce rate, a just over 75% conversion rate and a cart abandonment rate of 3.7%. The low numbers experienced by other sites don’t surprise me because few sites are designed to capture the majority of their visiting audience.

Essentially these sites don’t ask visitors “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?” and note that I’m asking the visitors how to achieve their goals while on the site, not how to get them to achieve the site’s goals for visitors.

Stephane Hamel

Some people would go through extensive scientific explanation or rely on black-magic to uncover the über segment that will gratify any business with triple digit conversion rate improvements. If I could only segment by one metric, that would be Recency – how long ago you came to the site, or purchased, or did something worthwhile for my business. Time and time again Recency has proven to be the best predictor of future behavior. In our field, Jim Novo has been a proponent of this metric and this has been studied in psychology, marketing, behavioral science, database marketing, etc.

Part of the RFM segmentation model (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), Recency would be a better predictor of behavior than any other metric. Think of it, just with this metric you can also segment new vs repeat visitors, prospects and long-time customers, unqualified visitors vs advocates, etc. Segmenting by Google search terms are interesting, doing it by social media source is cool, but nothing beats Recency. Philip Kotler, the gold standard in marketing management, sums it up nicely: “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master”… Have you checked your recency metric recently?

Now, the question I would ask returning visitors is very simple: What is your purpose of visit. Knowing that specific piece of qualitative info would allow me to see if/how I can help achieve their goal – and mine!

My Take

I love all 3 answers, and to prove it, I am going to implement them all. I’ll let you know the results as soon as I will have some.

I like Avinash’s answer cause it’s so plain simple to do and results can be very helpful. I love Joseph’s answer cause I don’t think you can get a better way to learn on how to optimize a conversion process; it really can’t get more relevant than that. I love Stephane’s answer because when visitors return over and over again to your website you can bet they have a good reason for it. You’d better find it out.

Your take now

If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be?

Give us your best shots and we’ll choose the ones we can accomplish and offer their implementations for your website, free of charge.