The Importance of Surveys, SurveyMonkey

I recently signed up for an account at SurveyMonkey after re-realizing the importance of surveys. Here’s the story…

My largest site, PC Mechanic, has actually been seeing a slight, but steady decrease in overall traffic. Nobody in this business likes to see decreases in traffic. Sure, all sites vary up and down on daily traffic, but when you open the Analytics account and look at a multi-month range and see a slow, but steady decrease over time, that’s not good. Even a flat trend is an emergency condition, because if you’re not growing, you’re actually contracting in relation to the rest of the web. So, the goal is to be seeing MORE traffic, not the same and certainly not less.

I’m left to wonder why this is. Are people bored with the site? Are we not providing what people need and want? Has our market just changed and now we’re not catering to a growing audience? My inclination is to go with the third. After all, PCMech hit the scenes and grew quickly back when PC ownership was a bit more exclusive. Today the computer is as common as a toaster. And, additionally, building a computer (the major draw to PCMech is building a PC) is now being done by a more exclusive group of people. Pre-built computers today are affordable and they get the job done. Without doubt, you will get a better quality and a more suitable computer by selecting the parts and building your own, but just because I and a select group know that doesn’t mean that the market as a whole knows that.

But, I could guess all day. In the end, its just me sitting here trying to get into the minds of my visitors. That’s stupid when I can directly ASK THEM. Hence, surveys.

Hosted Versus In-House

For the longest time, I have been running a PHP-based survey system locally on my own server called PHP Surveyor. It is now called LimeSurvey, but while the site interface isn’t so bad, the interface of the software really sucks. Don’t get me wrong…the software is very capable. However, its just not that fun to use because of the crappy interface. It is, though, free.

I wanted something more robust, supported and easier to use. I did some looking around for hosted survey options and settled on SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is clean and powerful. It actually looks as if they re-did their interface since I last checked them out. The system supports all the standard features that one would need in a survey. They offer integration options as a direct link, a popup, or an email which SurveyMonkey will send on your behalf. I like their system, and I signed up for an annual account for $200.

One might think that $200 is a lot of money, but think about the investment. The value that good reader feedback could have is much higher than $200. If you can find out exactly what your market needs and wants and then turn around and provide that, $200 is going to be a drop in the bucket.

I plan to make heavy use of SurveyMonkey in the short-term. We’ve got interesting things in store to bring some new blood into PCMech, but with surveys, we can precisely tailor this thing to what our readers need. And isn’t that the idea?

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