Five reasons why you need to be measuring visitor task completion

Cross-posted on Turn up the Silence

Every single iPerceptions online survey captures visitor task completion. You might wonder why we’re so married to this metric that we feature it in every piece of research we do. Here are five reasons why you need to be measuring visitor task completion and tapping into customer driven optimization:

1) Task completion is THE hard conversion metric for visitors who are not onsite to buy. If you are selling online, survey results consistently show that only 20% of your visitors are onsite with the distinct intent to buy. Sure, you can measure success among this segment using transactional conversion, but what about the others? Task completion quantifies visit success for the other 80%--browsers, researchers, comparison shoppers, price shoppers, blog readers, etc. Task completion measures how effectively you are pushing them down the funnel towards that crucial buying stage.

2) Task completion is a crystal ball into the future. Want to anticipate your visitors’ future online behavior? Measure online task completion. Our survey results show that task completion is a powerful predictor of visit loyalty, brand opinion, and anticipated purchasing behavior--all leading indicators of a customer's long-term commitment to your brand. The crucial finding here is that 60% of visitors who complete their tasks report a higher future likelihood to purchase, versus only 14% for those who do not complete their tasks.

3) Even if you don’t sell online, task completion can function as an extremely powerful predictor of future offline conversion. Data from webValidator online surveys running for durable goods retailers who do not sell online show that visitors who complete their onsite tasks (browsing, researching, viewing visuals, etc.) are significantly more likely to express higher offline purchasing likelihood than visitors who don't complete their primary onsite tasks.

4) Make your ad inventory more attractive and empower your ads sales team with your website task completion data. webValidator survey results reveal that visitors who complete their primary onsite tasks are 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the ads they see are credible. That's powerful data to have in tow if you want to justify your premium CPMs during a time of collapsing online ad spending.

5) It’s easy to get started with task completion. No complicated formulas, heuristics, or algorithms. No esoteric weighting systems. No specious and conflicting body of "academic" justification. Just a simple “yes” or “no” question that can be collected using a free online survey like 4Q. It’s a metric that holds marketers to account from day one. No hiding behind fuzzy definitions of satisfaction or engagement—instead, task completion is a simple, cut-and-dry barometer of visit success.