Hi everyone,
So today Google announced a handy new tool for webmasters which allows them to add quick and easy customer satisfaction forms to pretty much every website.
The forms, which you can set up easily here ask just a handful of quick questions and the free version allows a basic data capture point for your visitors.
Pretty standard Google. A neutral colour scheme which will integrate nicely with most OpenCart themes and templates although I imagine in the future there will be more settings to customise colours, font sizes etc. This is a long way away from the industry leading CSat (Customer Satisfaction) captures which pop up on many of the websites we all frequent but it does offer a subtle little prompt to visitors to gauge how they feel about your website. Using these Web Satisfaction forms, you can see whether people find it easy to navigate around your OpenCart store, which colours they like and what annoys them most about the site. Using this you can constantly tweak and modify your store, and the accompanying marketing plan to optimise customer conversion rates.
Setting up your Website Satisfaction Form
There are quite a few settings in the Web Satisfaction form setup which allows you to choose how many times a visitor can fill out a survey, how many pageviews to wait until the form pops up and things like deciding how long to wait if they dismiss the box. One cool setting I saw was the ability to hide or show the form for referral types which will allow you to segment and target a particular group of visitors to get less diluted data, I’d dig into your Google Analytics reports and find that segment you’re most interested in and target away! I would imagine that Google will be adding in new features as time goes by and they get more feedback.
The code itself is asynchronous meaning it doesn’t impact on page loading times because the page can load without waiting for it, so don’t worry about it making your site slow or anything! The code should be placed at the bottom of the screen just before the closing body tag.
Funnily enough, I had one of the CSat forms pop up while I was actually on the page setting up my own form!
Tracking Features
The idea is that the survey will run continuously for 30 days, collecting up to a maximum of 500 responses, which you can analyse and track from a handy dashboard. The pricing is confusing but it looks like you get a free form which you can’t change but other tiers where you can design your own advanced forms, including adding images in for answers instead of text, but you have to pay something around 1 cent per answer or $5 for 500 responses. It makes out like that’s a saving but to my mind you would be paying $5 for 500 responses anyway, right?
Negatives
It’s a pet hate of mine, living in the UK, when US based companies deny access to services outside of their own country. This new tool is no different, you have to be US based to use it at the moment but hopefully that restriction won’t last for long! You also have to add a line of script to OpenCart to get it to work which will raise the hairs of the non-techies reading this but I’ve made up a simple module which I’ll talk about below.
An OpenCart Extension for adding Google Website Satisfaction Forms into OpenCart
I’m always trying to find ways to integrate OpenCart further with marketing tools for enhancing campaigns so I immediately set about creating this cool extension which allows you to add a customer feedback form to OpenCart. I’ll just quickly run through how the module works, dead simple and it will integrate with any OpenCart store from 1.5+ with no messing up other plugins.
First step, go and set up your Google Website Satisfaction Form for free here.
Next, copy the asynchronous code it gives you like in the image below:
Upload the extension to your OpenCart store by dragging the files onto the root folder. No files are overwritten but you will need vqMod installed! Easy guide to doing that here.
Then, install the module named “Google Website Satisfaction Form” in your OpenCart admin section and open it up. Then post the code from the Website Satisfaction Form setup page here like below:
Click save and that’s it! Remember, currently this service only works in the US but there is nothing stopping you from installing it and getting everything ready for the moment it goes live outside of the states!
Get Website Satisfaction Forms installed on your OpenCart Store
To celebrate the launch of the new OpenCart communities I’ve set up on Facebook and Twitter after the growing success of the Google+ based OpenCart community, I’m giving this vital marketing tool away for just £2.99!
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=12403