CA2658173A1 - Method and system to measure visitors' activity on a website - Google Patents

Abstract

This invention relates generally to a method to measure visitors' activity on websites, and more particularly to a method and a system which links the total financial value of the activities done by visitors and the feedback provided by those visitors about the activities they do on the website.

Description

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 Title of the Invention [0001 ] Method and system to measure visitors' activity on a website Cross-Reference to Related Applications [0002] There are no cross-related applications.
Field of the Invention [0003] This invention relates generally to web analytics (i.e. measuring visitors' activity on websites), and more particularly to a system which calculates the total value of the activities done by visitors and links it to the feedback provided by those visitors about the activities they do on the website, thus helping web managers to prioritize their investments based on a value/satisfaction score evaluation.

Background of the Invention [0004] Most website owners desire information concerning the usage of their websites by their online visitors. For example, they want to know how many visitors have come to their site, why they came to the website, how many visits they made, what pages were most visited, etc. There are several software platforms that can help companies with tracking that type of information. Those platforms are called web Analytics platforms.

[0005] Currently, web analytics platforms are of two different types. They either follow a quantitative approach or a qualitative one.

[0006] The quantitative approach is to track every action done by visitors on websites and to aggregate that data in comprehensive statistics. Quantitative web analytics platform mainly provides statistics about the number of visits, number of visitors, the File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 pages viewed; about the software used by visitors, about their provenance (which website they came from before their visit), about their geo-location (what city they connected from), about their frequency of visit, about their total number of visits, and about the transactions that are made online.

[0007] The qualitative approach is based on questionnaires that visitors of a website are invited to fill after a visit on a website. Those questionnaires ask a series of questions to the visitors right after their visit, to understand their motivations, intentions, feelings about the website and the company, in the same way classic marketing research does.

[0008] Quantitative web analytics platforms, as the name of the category suggest, were initially designed to help webmasters to analyze the behavior of the visitors of their websites, so as to help them understand what had to be done to improve their visitors' experience. Over the years, analyzing the activities on websites has become more and more complex, as new technologies appeared, and the complexity of those platforms has increased accordingly. Consequently, analyzing the data provided by those platforms has become more and more reserved to specifically trained professionals, who use their deep technical knowledge and business sense to give sense to the web analytics data so that business decision makers understand what is happening on their website.

[0009] Currently, no web analytics platform on the market gathers at the same time quantitative analytics data and qualitative feedback data, as described in the above paragraphs, which makes it impossible for any web analytics platform to link automatically quantitative reports and qualitative feedback from visitors.
Presenting reports that would link those two types of data together represent an extensive amount of work as those two types of information, when they coexist, reside in two different systems, making it necessary to build all reports by hand.

Summary of the invention File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0010] The present invention relates to a new and distinct web analytics platform which links a quantitative, financial tracking of activities performed online by visitors of a website and qualitative questions asked online to those visitors after they perform specific activities on the website. The invention is hereinafter referred to by the name of NetWebValue ScorecardTM.

[0011] The new web analytics platform was conceived by the inventor in Montreal, Canada. The objective of NetWebValue ScorecardTM is to track the financial value of the activities performed by the visitors of a website and to link it to feedback from those visitors about the activities they did on the site. Linking those two types of information about activities on a website enables the owner of the website to understand which visitors' activities represent the biggest value for him, and at the same time what his most financially valuable customers think about the way each activity is offered online. By "activity", we mean any action made by a visitor on a website that is technically trackable. That includes but is not limited to: visiting a page, placing or moving the mouse over a dynamic section triggered by mouse roll-over, downloading a file, making a transaction, typing information, etc.

[0012] Particular embodiments of the present invention enable the owner of a website to generate reports about the quantitative, financial aspects of the activity on a website (financial value of the website for its owner, and value of every activity offered to the visitors of the site) and the qualitative feedback provided by the visitors who performed tracked actions on the site.

[0013] In one embodiment, the website owner can create an account online on the system. When the account is created, a unique piece of code is created for a customer.
That unique piece of code, when added to specific pages of a website, sends information to the system. The type of information generally logged includes the IP
address or the hostname of the visitor, the date and time of the connection, each element requested (page, image, etc.), the referring page, the platform used (OS, screen size, browser, etc.) and the size of the data transferred.

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0014] In another embodiment, the website owner can use the system to create a web activity report structure. To create that structure, the website owner creates entries called "activities" that correspond to specific actions that a visitor can do on the website. For each activity, the website owner decides which category / subcategory the activity belongs to (the website owner can create his own category structure while creating the activities). For each activity, the website owner also determines the technical trigger that confirms the activity was successfully done by the customer; that trigger can be any trackable action on the site (a specific page is viewed, a button is clicked, a file is downloaded, a zone is rolled over with the mouse, the customer remains on a page for more than a certain time, etc.). For each activity, the website owner also determines the financial value attributed to the activity, and the questions that must be asked to a visitor who does this activity, at the end of his visit.

[0015] In another embodiment, every time the system receives information that a page has been viewed, it adds the corresponding financial value to the report, thus tracking the total value of all possible activities done by the visitors of the site. The system also ads the corresponding question to the questionnaire that will be asked to the visitor at the end of his visit.

[0016] In another embodiment, the system presents reports about the activities, as specified in paragraph [0016], in the context of their financial value, which means that any information shown on the reports can be sorted by financial value. The website owner can see all the activities reports sorted by the value they represent for the company; he can see the total value of each section or subsection of his activity reports;
he can see the financial contribution of each activity, but also of each metric tracked by the system (ex: web browser used, OS used, screen resolution, country or city of connection, hostname, keyword searched in a search engine that resulted in a visit to the site, ad clicked that resulted in a visit to the website, referring website, etc.), which makes it possible to prioritize all improvements to the website based on the relative value of the activities that the site offers to its visitors.

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0017] In another embodiment, the system enables the website owner to create additional report structures to present the data differently, depending on the interest of the person who will read the report. For example, he could create a report showing the financial value of the help section by product type, and another one showing the value of those same activities by region of connection. That way, the system can generate reports that would fit the needs of product managers and of regional managers. To do so, the website owner simply creates a new report structure, and links the relevant activities previously created in the main report to the relevant categories and subcategories of the new report structure.

[0018] In another embodiment, the application automatically asks visitors, on their arrival on the website, if they agree to answer a short survey at the end of their visit. If the customer so agrees, the system will build a questionnaire containing the questions related to the activities that the customer does during his visit. At the end of the visit, when the visitor closes the website, a window will appear asking him the first page of the feedback questionnaire. The questions asked during the interview will depend on the activities that the customer did during his visit, and will also depend on the choices made by the website owner, who can configure the way the questionnaires are built (limiting the total number of questions, or the order of questions, or the questions that must only be asked once for a whole group of activities, etc.). Every customer answering the questionnaire will be asked, for each activity he did online, to rank the overall quality of his experience with that activity by a certain number of criteria (which can include look and feel, clarity of the text, readability, usability, easiness, general rating, or any custom rating programmed by the website owner).

[0019] In another embodiment, the system helps the website owner to decide what he should do to improve his website. To do so, the system saves all the ratings provided by customers for each activity, and displays the average rating in all reports generated by the system. That way, the website owner can directly link the relative value of each activity with the satisfaction level of the very users of that activity, which helps the website File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 owner decide what activities should be improved. Also, the website user can always click on a specific activity to see not only the generic ratings, but also the answers to all the specific questions asked about that activity, including open questions asking the visitors what they would expect for that activity and how they would like it improved.
That way, the website owner knows what he can do to meet his visitors' expectation for each activity.

[0020] Another embodiment of the system helps the website owner to prioritize the improvements on his website. To do that, the system calculate a coefficient based on the relative financial value created by the online activity and the rating given to the activity by users of that activity: of course, a higher relative value and a lower relative rating lead to a high priority ratio, as it shows that customers are dissatisfied by an activity that is financially important for the company. On the contrary, an activity with high satisfaction rating and low relative financial value will get a lower priority ratio, as there seems to be less emergency for the company to fix or improve that activity.

[0021 ] Another embodiment of the system helps the website owner to include the web activities reports inside the company's overall data analysis by making it possible to export all data contained in the reports in standardized formats supported globally by most data analysis software. Those formats include, but are not limited to, CSV and TXT
files.

[0022] Another embodiment of the system helps the website owner to communicate the reports to other people by generating printable versions of all the reports available in the system (in PDF format or in any other format convenient for printing). Before generating the printable version of the report, the website owner can select what information will be included in the report. The system then generates reports, including or not the data related to the questionnaires or the activities Objects of the Invention File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 1 I , 2009 [0023] The main advantage of the invention is to provide a scorecard about the activities offered on a website linking quantitative financial information about the actions done online by visitors of the website and qualitative feedback from those visitors about the specific activities they did online. Doing so shows at the same time, for each activity offered online, the financial value for the company AND the related customer satisfaction level and feedback. Linking those two types of information provides a new way to help decision-making for website owners, who can prioritize their improvements to the website visitor activity by visitor activity, based on the relative financial value of each activity for the company, the relative satisfaction score given by the users of each activity, and the qualitative feedback provided by the visitors, including their expectations for the website.

[0024] A further advantage of the invention is to provide the total financial value of each activity or group of activities offered on a website, and to link that total value with customer satisfaction ratings provided by customers who do those actions on the website.

[0025] A yet further advantage of the invention is to calculate a prioritization coefficient based on the total value of an activity and the rating given by users of that activity (where higher financial value with lower customer satisfaction rating means that there might be a high financial potential in improving the way the activity is offered online, and vice-versa).

[0026] A still further advantage of the invention is to aggregate and present all available statistics about the visitors and their activities on the site with their financial value and the related feedback left by visitors. Examples include but are not limited to Operating system, screen size, geographic location, ISP, last page before their visit, search engine used, keywords used, plug-in versions, etc.

Brief Description of the Drawings File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0027] Figure la is a screenshot showing an embodiment of an interface displayed on a user processing device, more particularly during the account creation process.

[0028] Figure lb illustrates a further step of the account creation process, the web profile creation.

[0029] Figure lc illustrates a further step of the account creation process:
instruction to add the tracking code to a web site.

[0030] Figure Id illustrates a further step of the account creation process:
sending tracking code to the technical team [0031] Figure le illustrates a further step of the account creation process:
confirmation that the code has been sent.
[0032] Figure 2 is a screenshot showing an embodiment of an interface displayed on a user processing device, more particularly the control panel.

[0033] Figure 3a is a screenshot showing an embodiment of an interface displayed on a user processing device, more particularly during the process reporting and showing the website dashboard.

[0034] Figure 3b illustrates a further step of the process reporting: adding events on the graph.
[0035] Figure 3c illustrates a further step of the process reporting: sorting the top processes by value (or top activities) [0036] Figure 3d illustrates a further step of the process reporting:
reporting the process details (or activity detail).

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March H, 2009 [0037] Figure 3e illustrates a further step of the process reporting:
reporting the process drilldown (or activity drilldown).

[0038] Figure 3f illustrates a further step of the process reporting:
reporting the process (or activity) drilldown, in a collapsed view.

[0039] Figure 4a illustrates the users data reporting, more particularly the website users dashboard.

[0040] Figure 4b shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their geography.

[0041] Figure 4c shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their navigator.
[0042] Figure 4d shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their operating system.

[0043] Figure 4e shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their screen resolution.

[0044] Figure 4f shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their screen colors.

[0045] Figure 4g shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their plug-in (Java).

[0046] Figure 4h shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their plug-in (flash).

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0047] Figure 4i shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their network.

[0048] Figure 4j shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their hostname.

[0049] Figure 4k shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their source type.

[0050] Figure 41 shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their referring website.

[0051] Figure 4m shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by their referring search engine.
[0052] Figure 4n shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by all sources.

[0053] Figure 4o shows an embodiment of a report list wherein the website users are grouped by keyword searched.

[0054] Figure 5a illustrates an embodiment of a feedback reports.

[0055] Figure 5b illustrates an embodiment of the survey editor: Survey editor Detailed Description of the Preferred Embodiment [0056] Figure 1 b: questions asked in zone 1 and 2 intend to gather data from the customers so as to be able to make benchmarks and provide that information to customers, by industry, company size, geography, etc.

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0057] Figure lc: The tracking code is provided in zone 5. The user can choose to put the code in his templates himself or to have the code and instructions sent to someone else in charge of the technical aspects of the site (zone 3 and 4).

[0058] Figure Id: if the user chooses to have the code sent, he then enters the necessary information, including the recipient email address (zone 6), the name and coordinates of the sender (zone 7) and an explanation message (zone 8). He can indicate in zone 9 if he wants to receive a copy of the email.

[0059] Figure le: If the user selected so, he then receives a confirmation of the email sending.

[0060] Figure 2: the user can see a recap. Table of all the sites he's tracking in his control panel (zone 10), ad all the custom reports (zone 11). Clicking on any report name take him to the relevant report dashboard.

[0061] Figure 3a: the dashboard displays a curve diagram presenting the value of the site over the default period. The user can change the period of the report by using the buttons in zone 12. The user can add "event stickers" to the curve diagram by clicking on the button in zone 13; which changes the state of the page as reflected in Figure 3b, zone 17.
In zone 14, the dashboard displays a synthetic report of the site's value and activity, and a table of top processes (by value). The user navigates through all the other specific sections of the report by using the menu in zone 15. At anytime, the customer can export his report, send it by email or print it in PDF by using the buttons in zone 16.
[0062] Figure 3c: the user can choose to display all the followed activities by clicking on the "processes" button in zone 18. The table in zone 19 displays the activities by decreasing order of value over the timeframe of the report. If the user clicks on the name of an activity in that table, the system then displays the activity details page (Figure 3d) showing statistic data related to that activity and feedback information left by the File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 website's visitors who did that activity over the report period. That information can also be exported, printed or sent by email.

[0063] Figure 3e: The application can display the reports sorted by category and subcategories of the processes, which helps the user navigate following its business logic, and view the value and ratings by main business categories. Zone 20 shows an example of display by categories. Those categories are created by the user, who can create and design the categories he wants. By clicking on a category name, the user then expands the category display to see the subcategories details and the process details, as seen in Figure 3f.

[0064] Figure 4a: the user statistic dashboard displays general statistics about the users who did an activity on the site. That information includes but is not limited to the number of active visitors (visitors who did an activity tracked by the system), the average value per visitor, by visit, etc.

[0065] Figure 4b: The application can display the value and feedback by geographical zone.

[0066] Figure 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4i et 4j: the system shows the value and the feedback depending of the technical environment of the user (browser, Operating system, screen resolution, screen colors, java machine version, flash plug-in version, Internet Provider, Hostname, etc.).

[0067] Figure 4k, 41, 4m, 4n, 4o: The application shows the value and the feedback obtained depending on the user source (source type, search engines, keywords searched, referring sites, etc.).

[0068] Figure 5a: the application produces reports on the feedback received, by activity offered online (number of answers received, average rating, etc.). That report can be sorted by value produced, by feedback rating, by "emergency rating", etc.

File number : 11563-001 Revision : as filed Date : March 11, 2009 [0069] Figure 5b: the application contains a survey editor, where the account owner can create the questions that he wants to ask to customers after their visit, before or after the questions directly related to the processes.

Claims

Claims

1. A method for building web activity reports for website owners, comprising the step of:
a. enabling the website owner to set a financial value for each activity that a visitor of his website can do online, and to set feedback questions to be asked to each visitor who does those activities on the website.
b. tracking the activities done by any visitor of the customer's website and displays a questionnaire containing the questions related to the said activities when the customer leaves the website, to solicit his feedback and subjective rating and comments about those specific activities he did online c. displaying web activity reports that include both financial value of the activities done by visitors over a selected period and the ratings given by those visitors specifically for each activity offered online.
d. showing the priority level for each activity, which represents the priority order in which the activities offered online should be improved, that priority level being calculated considering the relative value generated by the activity and the satisfaction ratings provided by customers.