Looking for feedback about your law firm’s website? Was your site overlooked by Sam, Aaron and Greg? You can now use Google consumer surveys to measure your visitors’ site satisfaction for free.
Perhaps the best way to improve your legal website or blog is to listen to what your visitors have to say about it.
While you can get great feedback via comments, social networks and even emails, you may also want some specific feedback about how satisfied your visitors are with the quality of your site itself.
This is where Google’s free satisfaction survey can be useful.
Since the survey lives on your site, you can get feedback immediately while visitors are still on your site. This makes it preferable to other site survey solutions that are presented to visitors after they have left your site.
The default website satisfaction survey asks visitors to answer four questions:
Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?
What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?
What is your main reason for visiting this website today?
Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?
Obviously, these are some pretty general questions. However, they’re a pretty good starting point from which to create additional questions.
Questions #2 and #3 are text fields and allow users to enter their own responses. So, you can get very specific custom user feedback.
While it’s against Google’s survey policy to solicit personally identifiable information, it’s still a good idea to remind users not to submit personal or confidential information through the survey form.
If you know how to add code snippets to your site, setting up the survey is really easy:
1. Sign into Google Consumer Surveys for website satisfaction to find the code snippet.
2. You have the option to enter the website name and URL, first time survey timing, and survey frequency.
First survey timing:
Show X pageview(s) to a user before they sees a survey.
This setting allows you to control the number of pageviews a user will see before showing the survey.
eg. If you want the survey to show after a user has visited 5 pageviews then enter 5 for the value of this setting.
Survey frequency:
Wait Y pageview(s) before showing visitors a survey again.
This setting allows you to control the number of pageviews a user will see after the previous prompt (X) before seeing another survey.
eg. If you don’t want users to see another survey for 10 pageviews then enter 10 for the value of this setting.
3. Click on the “Activate survey” button when ready.
4. Once you find the code snippet on top of the setup page, copy and paste it into your web page, just before the closing tag. If your website or blog uses templates to generate pages, enter it just before the closing tag in the file that contains the
section. (Most websites re-use one file for common content, so it’s likely that you won’t have to place the code snippet on every single page of your website.)
Be careful not to go nuts with the first survey timing and survey frequency settings. If you abuse these, you’re likely to annoy visitors.
If you end up finding that you want to ask additional questions, you can also create custom surveys, which cost only 1¢ per completion.
You may recall Mike Blumenthal’s custom survey about how people use the internet to find specialty lawyers. This survey was created with Google consumer surveys.
Before you create your own survey, check out Google’s support information on survey tips and question types.
At the time of posting, Google is also offering $50 off your first survey.
While there are many online survey tools from which to choose, weighing affordability, ease-of-installation and functionality, Google’s consumer survey tool is among the best.
Of course, you can also use the consumer survey tool for other purposes, like improving client service.
Do you provide a means for users to provide feedback about your website? What are they telling you? What other online survey tools have you found to be effective?
(Photo by: http://gameshows.wikia.com/)
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