Use website surveys to understand why people are visiting your website, and how they found the overall experience—even if they’re not a paying customer.
But you don’t have to wait until a customer hits the “purchase” button to start gathering feedback. You can use website surveys to understand why people are visiting your website, and how they found the overall experience—even if they’re not a paying customer.
That’s great data for marketing teams. It gives you insight into which areas are suiting the intent of your visitors (and which aren’t.)
What is a website survey?
A website survey is a series of questions your visitors are shown.
These surveys can be embedded into your content—like at the end of a blog post, for example. But most often they’re small pop-ups, usually appearing on the entire screen or towards the bottom. They’re more eye-catching this way.
Before we dive into the website survey examples, it’s interesting to note the different types of survey. For example, you can have:
Generic surveys: Asking about the shopping experience, website usability and questions about the brand.
Visitor intent surveys: To figure out why someone is visiting your site—like to purchase a product, read a blog post, view pricing options, etc.
Feedback surveys: What do people think about your product? What would they rate your website out of 5? Did they notice any ads?
Product surveys: Understand the individual person and the product(s) they might be interested in.
6 website survey examples
Now we know the different types of website surveys, here are six great examples to show them in action:
Chances are, you’ve got tons of data sources to start understanding your website visitors—like Google Analytics, for example. But these tools don’t always give you the feedback you need (and the data isn’t completely accurate.)
Thinx doesn't rely on their Google Analytics referral data to learn how their visitors found their website. Instead, they’re using a feedback pop-up survey shown towards the bottom of the page. It’s a simple checkbox people can tick to share how they heard about the brand—helping Thinx understand which areas of their marketing are performing best in terms of brand awareness:
2. Norton’s feedback survey
Some people think website pop-ups are irritating. A survey that appears when somebody shows an intent to exit, however, stops the pop-up from ruining their browsing experience.
This survey pop-up from Norton, for example, appears when you show an intent to exit the page. It asks for me to score how happy I was with their website on a scale of 1 to 10, why I was visiting, and whether I was able to complete that purpose.
This lets Norton know where their website is failing. If I landed there to see pricing details but I couldn’t find them, my feedback helps them fix it.
3. Pluralsight’s chatbot survey
Who said all websites had to be pop-ups? Take this example from Pluralsight. They’re using a chatbot to survey their audience, starting by asking for permissions to ask the visitor a question.
The chatbot then proceeds to ask what situation their visitor is facing. That way, the chatbot can direct them to the most relevant resource on their site.
This is a great way to deliver personalized content. Once Pluralsight know more about each individual visitor, they can point them in the direction of resources best-suited to that person:
4. Christina Dodd’s website survey pop-up
Christina Dodd has a blog dedicated to books. She’s a best-selling author herself, who also reviews other books and publishes them to her site. But to really understand her audience, and the books they’re reading, her blog displays a pop-up as you show an intent to leave the page.
It thanks you for visiting, and directs you to a full-page survey that asks which book-related activities they’ve completed in the past week. It also gives them an opportunity to opt into her email list—helping her collect their lead information after they’ve completed the survey.
5. Cancer Data Aggregator’s user intent pop-up
The Data Science center for the National Cancer Institute has a website pop-up also triggered by an intent to leave the page. It appears once your cursor heads towards the exit button of your browser tab.
The feedback form starts by asking permission to show you the survey. Once it appears, you’re asked for the reason you’re visiting their website—such as looking for event details or reading their blog.
Again, this gives them a better understanding of their website activity. Sure, Google Analytics can show them their most popular pages. But this gives concrete, unbiased information that shows the main intent for people visiting the website.
6. Bonia’s exit intent surveys
Most of the website survey examples we’ve talked about so far have questions related to customer experience. However, this example from Bonia shows you can use it to boost product sales.
They added a three-step questionnaire to their website which started by asking if the customer found what they were looking for. If they didn’t they asked what prevented them from ordering.
The result? They found that 15% of visitors found what they were looking for, but didn’t buy because of budget restraints. They changed their website around to ease this, and saw a 28% increase in conversions in a product category.
Website survey templates
If you're ready to launch your website survey, at ConvertFlow we have lots of free website survey templates in our template library.
Elise is a writer at ConvertFlow, and expert in B2B marketing. She's been featured in publications like ConversionXL, HubSpot, CoSchedule, Content Marketing Institute, Databox, and more. You'll usually find her cooking up some high-quality content for the ConvertFlow blog or campaign library.
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