Are you falling into the trap of “leading the witness” in your post-purchase surveys?
Post-purchase surveys like Fairing and KnoCommerce can be an excellent resource to understand why people buy your product, but beware of ads impacting consumer responses and leading to confirmation bias.
I call this the survey-bias cycle of hell. Here’s how it works:
1) A consumer clicks on a TikTok or Meta ad that has a very clear reason to buy
2) The consumer is asked why they bought and chooses the very reason they clicked on the ad.
3) The advertiser thinks this is the primary reason people are buying and make more ads that speak to that reason.
4) Instead of reaching new customer personas, the brand gets pigeon-holed into only reaching a segment of their addressable audience.
Instead of only focusing on what your existing data says, it’s important to understand why the data is displayed that way and come up with different tactics to reduce bias in the data.
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Here are 5 ways to reduce confirmation bias:
1) Instead of radio buttons, implement a “check-all that apply” style question and look at waterfall of responses.
2) Consider asking users to rank different benefit instead of asking for one.
3) Ask roundabout questions to understand a consumers behavior. In the example here, that could mean asking “What type of diet do you keep?”
4) Run surveys by email to get broader insights from customers that will be less impacted by ad experiences.
5) Conduct more qualitative interviews with consumers to dig a bit deeper and unlock insights a survey alone likely can’t help with.
Without taking these steps into consideration to reduce confirmation bias, you may end up in a cycle of continuing to reach the same users vs growing your brand with new customer types in your target audience.
