Use Task Analytics for a Better Digital Experience

Do you use Google Analytics or maybe Adobe Analytics? You probably do as these are standards in the toolkits of most modern digital marketers.

These web analytics tools are good at several things: Tracking user actions like page views, showing which channel the visitor found you from, even measuring how long people watch a video. A ton of insights.

But you should also be asking: what information aren’t these tools providing?

Task Completion Rate is a big one.

Web analytics tools are not meant to measure when your site fails to help someone accomplish a task. Maybe a visitor couldn’t figure out how to create an account or couldn’t find the link or page they needed. Frustration isn’t a metric quantified in Google Analytics.

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating your site. You don’t want it to be like sites we’ve all been on which are unclear and difficult to navigate, leaving people with a bad impression.

How do you create an effective website if you aren’t tuned into why users came to your site in the first place?

This is where Task Analytics comes in.

What Google and Adobe Analytics fail to reveal, Task Analytics excels at. Task Analytics is a sponsoring partner of MarTech Wiz.

They call it Intent Analytics.

Task Analytics (the software) uses Intent Analytics (the methodology) to measure the intended goal of your visitors, their journey to attempt to complete it, and whether or not they were successful.

Importantly, you don’t have to choose just one analytics tool to use. Use Task Analytics as an extension of your web analytics tool whether it’s Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. They complement each other well!

We as users visit websites most of the time to complete certain tasks. A task could be completing a purchase, tracking a package, finding a phone number, or creating an account.

So you already have a task-oriented site but now optimize it for the top tasks - the most requested tasks.

Task Analytics asks visitors what they are trying to accomplish and then tracks the percentage of people that did or didn’t achieve that intended task.

This is the Task Completion Rate, a critical KPI that quantifies whether or not your site is addressing the primary reason users come to your site.

Task Analytics asks visitors what they are trying to accomplish and then tracks the percentage of people that did or didn’t achieve that intended task.

Intent analytics is tied closely to the top task methodology. Task analytics will also help you identify the top tasks of your website.

So you are trying to optimize your site for user experience. You want users to have a great experience and be able to navigate all pages beautifully and get every last question answered, make every little page perfect.

Allocate resources proportionally to importance level of your top pages

If this sounds like you, you might be taking the wrong approach.

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule (aka Pareto's law). It also applies to website behavior – 20% of pages account for 80% of pageviews. So what’s the takeaway?

Focus on those top pages. Allocate more resources proportional to their importance. Focus 80% of your resources on that 20% of your site. Really optimize for those prioritized tasks even if it means restraining resources to lesser requested pages or tasks.

Similarly, a large percentage of your website visitors are coming to your site to complete only a limited number of top tasks. 80% of your visitors mainly come to your site for 20% of all the tasks that can be done on your site.

With Task Analytics, you can identify the top tasks of your site from a user perspective and optimize the journey to task completion in order to build a better digital experience

Once Task Analytics has gathered the data, it provides a beautiful dashboard spotlighting what is working and not working on your site. 

A large percentage of your website visitors are coming to your site to complete only a limited number of top tasks.

Often those of us who create sites, content and all things digital think we know what visitors want best. We have the login to GA after all!

The problem is we oftentimes don’t have a clue. The impressive, leak-proof funnel you drew out on the whiteboard probably won’t survive first contact with your first visitor on day one of launch. People are hard to predict. So don’t try. Let Task Analytics tell you what they are looking to do and have it amplify your current web analytics tool.

People are hard to predict. So don’t try. Let Task Analytics tell you what users are looking to do.

Task Analytics respects the user by making the information gathering as non-invasive as possible. They have studied survey design and incorporated those principles into the creation of the tool. The tool only asks for important information and if a user doesn’t want to participate they can easily decline.

Task Analytics can even clarify some of the misleading insights that traditional analytics tools provide. Take bounce rate, for example. Bounce rate is the percentage of your website visitors who only view one page then leave, or bounce. Typically viewed as a negative, a one-page visit could be a positive experience if that page provided exactly what was needed in one go.

Maybe you are planning to do user testing and are wondering how this is different. While user testing is generally worthwhile, it can introduce bias as you are telling users which task to complete (like create an account). Intent analytics’ premise is that you don’t know what you don’t know so you might be clueless to reasons a user is visiting the site so wouldn’t know what task to have them complete in the first place. Task Analytics is for real users not in a controlled environment. It finds out what real-life reasons they visited your site through real interactions.

While user testing is generally worthwhile, it can introduce bias as you are telling users which task to complete

The end result: a more effective website. Task Analytics provides key insights that help you improve the user experience by addressing issues the users identified as challenging. These are insights based on customer actions and feedback, not the echo chamber of your internal organization with all their biases.

These insights from Task Analytics help optimize your site, leading to increased task completion rates and user satisfaction scores to ultimately help drive business goals such as revenue growth.

To get started, you can register for a free Task Analytics account here.