Understanding Motivation

Web analytics is a discipline that aims to scientifically and objectively observe web site behavior and use that observation to model and predict other behavior. However, there’s something to be said for understanding the “why’s” of behavior as well. Adotas recently posted an article about WhitePages.com and their effort to understand the psychology of how and why people prefer to contact companies, and most importantly, what kinds of personal information they are comfortable revealing on the Internet. Is there personal information that you are unwilling to share under any circumstance with a website or is your willingness to share information dependant on your level of trust in that company? Are there incentives that could induce you to share more information? It’s not enough anymore just to know that someone abandoned your lead generation form, the next level of analysis is to understand WHY.