4Q: A Simply Brilliant Survey Solution

I purchased Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics about six months ago. With the subtitle “An Hour a Day” I figured it was just what I needed to get on top of my traffic. Generally, I do quite a bit of poking around before I buy a book. I am very particular about my library and I want to make sure it is something I will actually read. However, on this day I was in a rush and I figured I’d just grab it and go. Any book that could teach me something in an hour a day was a book for me.

Right.

Later that night I took the book out of the bag and read the back carefully. It seems I had misunderstood that subtitle a bit. What Avinash meant was that after you read the book and learned all the stuff in it then you, as a website/blog owner, could perform web analytics in an hour a day. That is not exactly what I was looking for, but I thought I’d at least give the intro a shot.

Fast forward six months later. I have read the book several times - not always in the right order, of course - and I subscribe to Avinash’s blog Occam’s Razor. It is, in fact, one of the few blogs in my RSS reader that I always am sure to catch up with at least weekly. The point is, I am a huge fan of Avinash. I think he has an absolutely brilliant mind and he really knows how to make numbers and psychology work together to design killer measurement methods.

I was so excited when Avinash left a comment about Pajama Professional’s new theme that I actually called my best friend at work to tell her. Seriously. It was the equivalent of my eight-year-old niece meeting Hannah Montana. If I had a twelve-year-old niece (they are 19 and 14) and if she liked Hannah Montana, that is.

For the good of all of us, Avinash has teamed up with iPerceptions to create 4Q. 4Q is the ultimate visitor survey. Completely non-invasive, visitors to your site randomly receive an invitation (in the form of a pop-up window) to participate in a survey after their time on your site. If they agree, the survey launches in a second window, waiting in the background until the user is ready to reply. 4Q explains the invitation process like this:

“4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.”

It is a well-known fact that everyone hates pop-up windows. In this case, though, it does not sound annoying. There will be no flashing animated GIF promising you that, as visitor 3,444,598 to the site, you have won $14,000. If the user refuses the survey, the pop-up goes away. And stays away.

The percentage of users who are asked to complete the survey is completely customizable. You can adjust the “survey invitation rate” using a simple slider in your account settings. As for how many visitors you should survey, 4Q recommends:

“Remember to keep in mind your traffic figures when making changes to the invitation rate. Too small a sample could produce results that lack statistical validity. But too high a sample rate might mean you are surveying more visitors than you really need to in order to get valid results. It is important to find a balance.”

This advice is especially excellent given the fact that this survey will return such golden results. The questions are simple. The visitor is asked why they came to the site (multiple choice), if they achieved their goal (yes or no), if they enjoyed their visit (scale from 1 to 10) and an open-ended question that basically lets the user speak freely about their experience in 500 characters. It is fast, simple and just perfectly brilliant.

Did I mention that 4Q is free? Well, it is. So if I were you, I’d head on over and sign up for 4Q before they come to their senses and start charging for this awesome service.

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