QuestionPro Blog

This is a guest post from Gary Angel, President of Semphonic, a web analytics company based in San Francisco:

In the last post, I talked about the beautiful symmetry between the types of questions you can answer with online survey research and those you can answer with web analytics data. When you put the two together, it opens up whole new realms of analysis and significantly deepens the usefulness of each. So it’s no wonder that the integration of VOC data with web behavioral data is an increasingly common wish-list item for our clients of every sort. And here’s the good news – it’s something that’s usually quite a bit easier than people think.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through the steps necessary to integrate your QuestionPro online survey data with Omniture – the leading enterprise web analytics solution. Although some of the specifics will differ, the basic steps are applicable to most web analytics solutions.
As I walk through this, I’ll discuss some different levels of integration – starting with the simplest and most basic and working my way up.

The Most Basic VOC Integration

Web Analytics solutions almost all work by placing a small snippet of javascript code on the web page to measure (this is called the tag). You need to be able to add this javascript tag to your surveys to get any level of integration, and fortunately, QuestionPro gives you several very reasonable options for doing this. You can insert code into Header or the Footer of each page or directly onto the Thank You page.

In the screenshot below, I’ve opened the survey footer and inserted the page code for Omniture. You can link out to the s_code.js file or you can embed the s_code.js entirely within the text here. Keep in mind that if you are using a 1st Party measurement cookie there may be issues but if you are using the default 3rd Party cookie this will work simply and admirably (if you don’t know what type of cookie your site uses, check with your IT department).

For many projects, you’ll only want to tag the Thank You page since your primary interest will in capturing the actual survey responses.

When you’ve put the basic tag on the page, you now have the core of the integration. Your survey respondents will be registered in the appropriate web analytics reports and their survey page will be sessionized with the rest of their behavior.

This very basic level of integration takes only a few minutes on a typical survey.
The fact that someone took a survey isn’t really salient point about them. For real integration, you need to capture either their survey responses or their respondent id so you can match up the data later. However, I prefer to integrate the respondent data directly in real-time. I think it’s easier and in many ways more functional.

But let’s start with integrating just the respondent id.

The respondent id is available in a special variable that you can use. Here’s an example of the tag on the QuestionPro Thank You page:

This code places the special variable ${response_id} in the Omniture s.prop1 variable. QuestionPro just substitutes the true response id wherever you insert the “${response_id}” string. So you can set any variable you like with it – in this case, I’ve stuffed it into s.prop1.

With the respondent id in the web behavioral stream, you can pull a data feed on all survey respondents and match up to your survey data. You can look up the behavior of individual survey respondents and see how it fits with their responses. And you can integrate the survey data back into Omniture on a batch basis. So even though this is the most basic level of real integration, it does deliver some real value add. Not bad for 20 minutes of work.

This level of integration takes virtually no effort or time. But you don’t really have the survey response data in the web analytics tool – you just have a key. You can do quite a bit more than this with just a little more effort. I’ll take the integration up one level in my next post.

More Info:

• Omniture’s SiteCatalyst: http://www.omniture.com
• Semphonic, a web analytics consultancy: http://www.semphonic.com/
• How to Combine Web Analytics Data with Survey Data (Part 1 of 3):  http://blog.questionpro.com
• How to Combine Web Analytics Data with Survey Data (Part 3 of 3):  http://blog.questionpro.com

[Gary Angel is President of Semphonic, the leading independent web analytics consultancy in the United States. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices in Washington, D.C. and Boston, Semphonic works with all of the major web analytics tools including Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, Google Analytics and Coremetrics. Semphonic clients include companies like the American Express, Barclays, the BBC, Charles Schwab, Genentech, Intuit, Kohler, the National Cancer Institute, National Geographic, Nokia, and Turner Broadcasting.]