Is web analytics tools user data alone enough? Is there a role for qualitative research?

Aug 24

Let me be candid—I've been grappling with how to kickstart this article. Truth be told, I even turned to Chat GPT 4 for assistance, yet nothing substantial materialized. So, I've decided to just dive in and write down my thoughts. The idea of this article came when I started exploring Google Analytics and other web analytics tools to not only see what they can do (I am naturally curious and inquisitive this way), but also to gauge the possible roles of qualitative research in it.

After immersing myself in it, I was genuinely amazed by the breath of insights these tools deliver, be it user identification, source of user acquisition, behavioral analysis, benchmark performance against industry peers amongst others, But even with its impressive nature, the data still lacks depth and context, with obvious information gaps, making qualitative research absolutely indispensable in this case. Now let me explain my thoughts, on a broader level, these web analytics tools proficiently paint a comprehensive picture of how your business is performing currently (and how it has evolved by looking into the historical data points). But they do not tell you the reasons behind those performances, and without the “why’s”, you will not be able to come up with ideas to optimize your business.

\Consider the example of a low conversion rate (the % of visitors who makes a purchase). While it tells you how many are buying from you, and even tells you how your number is compared to against industry peers. But ask yourself this, does it tell you how you can improve the rate? Here lies the problem, you know how you are doing but you just don’t know how you can improve it because you do not know why the number is this low. This is exactly where qualitative research comes into play. We can recruit users and non-users alike, and uncover the exact motivations behind buying or not buying from you. Knowing those reasons and motivations will go a long way to creating solutions/strategies to boosting the conversion rate.

Consider another example of these tools ability to filter the data by “user segmentation”. To me, what it does is not exactly “segmentation”, it only really categorizes users on a surface level—dividing them into users vs. non-users, or paid vs. organic traffic. Yet, true user segmentation goes in much more details, delving into motivations and psychographics, beyond the surface level demographic or behavioral data. While I am not alluding that looking at user vs non-user data is useless, but they do not help you create an effective user targeting strategy with the simple fact that not all users or non-users in those data set are homogeneous. Just as you cannot create a targeting strategy by lumping all beer drinkers together as one homogeneous group. Effective targeting strategy demands detailed user segmentation as its foundation, which only really qualitative research can provide.

Now that we have established there are obvious data gaps that only qualitative research can fulfil, so what kind of qualitative research would I recommend then? To answer that question, let’s look at what end-user research is like traditionally, especially when it comes to the relationship between quantitative and qualitative research. Traditionally, qualitative research precedes quantitative, in that we use qualitative methodologies to form a hypothesis of the objectives in question, and then we plug those data points into a quantitative survey to verify our hypothesis with confidence with a statistically significant sample size.

But with the advent of web analytics tools, this process is now reversed. As a business, you need to study the data set closely and identify the missing gaps that is vital in forming your business strategies. These gaps are effectively your qualitative research objectives. Then of course, you will need to gauge professional qualitative research firms like ours to recommend to you just what kind of qualitative approach should be used. And given the nature of the constantly evolving digital world, I would recommend conducting qualitative research on a periodic and repeating basis, such as semi-annually or even quarterly. The scale of the research does not need to be large (as qualitative is not about statistics), they just need to be in-depth, Ultimately, this effort should not costs you an arm and a leg. Remember, you are just looking to qualitative research to fill the gaps so you can form effective strategies.

Well, that’s all I have for now. I hope this helps you guys. As usual, make sure you follow us on our LinkedIn page to keep up with our latest insights and opinion posts.