Some visitor analytics look good on the surface, but may actually represent a visitor experience total failure.

I’ve been a huge fan of Website Visitor Analytics for over 15 years.  Analytics like time on page, number of pages viewed, and returning visitors were some of the standard metrics that I’ve relied on to determine how successful new content was and how our website was performing overall.

Recently someone asked me a question that caused me to reconsider everything that I had taken for granted about those metrics for all these years.

They asked me if the examples below for time on page, pages viewed and repeat visits represented a good or bad visitor experience:At first I was confused? Was this a trick question? “They’re all very good” I said. “The visitor spent 5 minutes on the first page they landed on, that content is a home run. They were clearly seeing something they liked because they went on to view several additional pages of content and they revisited the site several times. Those are all very good visitor engagement indicators.”

Their second question, left me dumbfounded, “What if those visitor analytics represent a total failure of that persons experience on your website? Clearly the visitor was motivated and persistent, but what if they spent all that time on your website, searching through all that content because they couldn’t actually find the information they wanted?”

And their last question was the killer, “How can you currently tell the difference between those two very different user experiences based on the Website Visitor Analytics alone?”

I’ll admit it, until that moment that thought had never occurred to me.  The point they were making was, the problem with typical Website Visitor Analytics is that you’re actually interpreting what you think a website visitors behavior means based on some assumptions that may not actually be true. You don’t actually know the question that the visitor is trying to find the answer to, what information the visitor is looking for, or if they found it.

Now the question was, how do I action this new information? As far as I know current website analytics software can’t read visitors minds, and so I’m still left with Website Visitor Analytics as one of the only practical tools to interpret website visitor behavior, as imperfect as those analytics might be.

Except it turns out, there is a way to get direct insight into precisely what questions each unique visitor is trying to answer and the information they are trying to find on your website, and equally importantly, to measure how successful your website was in providing it.

This Web Analytics tool can capture questions directly from visitors, it knows which page of content the visitor was on when they asked the question, and whether the content on that page addressed the question or not.

It’s called a “Conversational AI Answer Engine”.  It allows website visitors to type or say their questions into their SmartPhone or computer and provides 97% first answer effectiveness. It has multiple neural networks to allow it to learn, as well as to easily handle things like typos and multiple variations of the same question.

Unlike the legacy chatbots we’ve all come to hate on our mobility provider or airline’s website, the Conversational AI Answer Engine technology improves the visitor experience and helps the vendor get real insight into visitor intentions in four significant ways:

1) Visitors get instant answers to their questions without having to learn how to navigate your website or read through pages of irrelevant content to get to the information they really want.

2) Vendors get direct ‘voice of the customer’ visibility into EXACTLY what the visitor is looking for and can confirm whether or not the visitor successfully found the content and information they needed.

3) Vendors are able to quickly and accurately identify gaps in existing content and confirm the relevancy of current content to meet visitors needs.

4) The vendor can encourage engagement and boost conversions by more accurately pairing the right calls to action with the right content (e.g. do visitors ask questions about demo’s, contacting a salesperson, or how to get started, while on a particular page of content).

Knowing the questions website visitors are trying to find the answers to, where they are on your site when they’re asking those questions and if the content satisfied those questions eliminates having to interpret what visitor behavior really means. You actually know, directly from the visitor.

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