5 advanced feedback tips to collect deeper user insights

Collecting user ratings and comments with a feedback widget is a low-effort way to get insights without interrupting the customer journey.

But you’ll get more out of user feedback (especially negative feedback) if you learn which pages and users to target, how to analyze your findings, and what other analytics tools you can use to complement your insights.

This guide takes you through five advanced user feedback tips to help you use Contentsquare’s feedback widget to its fullest potential. Use these tips to gain deeper insights into user behavior, make your website more customer-centric, and grow the metrics that matter to your business.

1. Target feedback to specific users, events, or pages

Site-wide feedback is a useful starting point, but you’ll save time and home in on business-critical optimizations by targeting your feedback widget to specific pages, demographics, or actions.

Capture feedback with Contentsquare’s feedback widgets in Surveys. Users can rate their experience on a scale using emoticons representing ‘Hate’ to ‘Love’

How? Analyze your conversion funnels to identify which pages get the biggest drop-offs. Adding a feedback widget to those pages helps users report any issues, confusion, or unanswered questions that might stop them from converting. And it lets you tap into negative feedback that can help guide improvements.

Use Contentsquare's Journeys to visualize a conversion funnel for your most important customer paths, such as:

• Adding an item to cart ➡️completing checkout

• Visiting the blog ➡️ signing up for a trial

Trigger your feedback button by URL or event to only appear on pages with the most user drop-offs.

You can also target and filter feedback by user attribute or—if you use Contentsquare’s Google Analytics (GA) integration—GA Events. This allows you to target a widget to users who fit specific demographics or take certain actions, for example, iPhone visitors in the US who have downloaded an ebook. 

💡Pro tip: if you’ve collected untargeted feedback across your site, you can still find negative feedback by filtering the responses by rating. Other filtering criteria include country, device, URL, and keyword. 

Here’s an example of targeted feedback in action: ecommerce management company eShopWorld added feedback widgets to clients’ checkout pages. If the team saw a drop in conversion rates, they reviewed comments to identify common issues and cross-checked the data in Google Analytics to determine which customer segments were affected.

The team then looked at individual session replays (see tip #2 below!) to understand exactly how shoppers who didn’t convert behaved. By targeting and combining negative feedback with other conversion data points, eShopWorld could find and fix points of friction—and increase conversion rates. 

2. Combine user feedback with other analytics tools to get a ‘big-picture’ understanding of user behavior 

On their own, feedback responses give you insight into what users think and experience as they navigate through your website. But, sometimes, negative feedback still leaves you guessing what you need to fix. 

For instance, a response like, “This page isn’t working!” tells you there’s something wrong, but not what exactly is wrong. That’s why you’ll benefit from combining feedback tools with other analytics tools to pinpoint the issue without wasting time on assumptions.

In Contentsquare, combining feedback with the Session Replay tool is the easiest way to start.

Each response is linked to its replay.

Navigate to feedback-specific session replays with ease 

Click the button to view a replay of the user’s session, including the moment they left feedback. 

Watch what they did just before leaving feedback: did they rage-click on a button that didn’t work? Did they scroll past something important?

Here’s an example of how this could work for you: gym and spa marketplace Hussle placed a feedback button on the product sign-up page (see tip #1 about targeting ⬆️) to understand what stopped people from signing up for corporate accounts. 

Negative feedback responses like “It’s impossible to register” revealed people were leaving because they couldn’t sign up—but without additional data, the team didn’t know why. 

By viewing companion recordings, the team realized people were trying to sign up without adding a payroll number. A quick change to the sign-up page error message fixed the funnel bottleneck before it became a serious issue.

You can also combine negative feedback with the Heatmaps tool by filtering any heatmap by feedback rating. Generate a heatmap of users who selected ‘Hate’ or ‘Dislike’ and compare it to a heatmap of visitors who gave you a ‘Love’ or ‘Like’ rating. Are there differences in clicking and scrolling behavior? Are unhappy visitors missing important information?

3. Create a customer feedback dashboard to monitor sentiment

Customers’ ratings of their experience with your website play a huge role in how likely they are to give you repeat business or recommend you to others. 

Because the Contentsquare feedback widgets always ask people to rate their customer experience on a scale from 1–5, you can keep track of your average experience score and quickly see if your efforts are improving overall sentiment—or if there’s a spike in issues to investigate. 

There are a couple of ways to achieve this: the easiest is to add a sitewide feedback button and monitor the feedback metric in Contentsquare.

Easily analyze topics of user feedback in Contentsquare 

You can even segment the feedback metric to cover a subset of pages (for example, your blog or product pages) so you can see how sentiment differs for different parts of your website. 

Another way to create a customer experience dashboard is to integrate Contentsquare with your favorite performance reporting tool, like Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). 

The team at homeware retailer Matalan did exactly this, using their dashboard to give every department visibility into their users' website experience over time while making it easier (and quicker) to spot issues before they became big problems.

Matalan’s experience dashboard pulled feedback responses into Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio)

💡Pro tip: if your team uses communication tools to keep organized, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can also use Contentsquare’s integrations to view feedback responses in real time.

4. Embed a feedback widget to avoid interrupting the user journey 

One big reason a site-wide feedback button helps you collect large volumes of feedback is its prominence and visibility—but having a button permanently present on the side of your website pages could sometimes be counterproductive. 

Users might visually ‘tune it out’ after a few pages and ignore it throughout the rest of their journey, or find the site too cluttered, particularly on pages where other widgets (like customer support chatbots or newsletter pop-ups) already exist.

Embedded feedback widgets are Contentsquare’s solution to both problems: you can embed a widget on any page, in line with other page elements, exactly where you want to get feedback. 

For example, embed a widget at the bottom of your help pages to determine whether the content has been helpful, or below a blog post or video tutorial to get people’s reactions.

5. Set up a survey to collect more detailed feedback

Contentsquare’s feedback widget lets you capture in-the-moment emotions from visitors to your site, but sometimes you want more in-depth feedback to do things like

• Investigate specific user experience (UX) questions, like “What’s making users bounce from this page?”

• Hear from customers after they’ve used your product or made a purchase

With Contentsquare Surveys, you aren’t limited to scale-based feedback and can create surveys with open- and closed-ended questions to get deeper insight from users.

You can start from scratch, use our free survey templates for specific use cases, or have our AI technology create the survey for you.

Use AI to help you create a Contentsquare survey

For example, use an exit-intent survey template if you need to figure out why people are leaving your checkout page without completing a purchase.

Or send a customer satisfaction survey to measure how customers feel about their overall experience with your brand.

Gain a competitive edge by putting people first

The biggest mistake you can make when collecting user feedback insights is not collecting any at all. But by implementing advanced feedback tips, you gain an edge over your competition, leveraging actionable insights into data-driven improvements that grow your business by putting people first. 

FAQs about user feedback insights