Introduction

Ever wondered why more of your website visitors aren’t submitting forms? Why you aren’t getting demos booked? Why the drop-off rate is so high?

Today, we will show you how to uncover valuable insights into what’s going on with your forms and how to improve them.

Who needs forms?

Forms are everywhere. They are usually the main point of contact between the customer and the service being provided.

Have an e-commerce store? You’ll have a checkout form, a contact form and maybe even one or two more forms for custom product designs.

SaaS? Oh you’ll have a register/login form, a contact form and more.

B2B lead-gen? Forms are pretty much the entirety of your business. They are the means by which your leads are acquired and make sure Sales don’t get bored.

So, how do we make sure these forms are doing what they should be doing?

Form-field analyses is the art of designing your website forms in a way that is clear, engaging and easy to fill out so that any user who lands on the form will have no problems completing it.

It is extremely important across all verticals, but even more so with those industries accustomed to lengthly and complex forms, such as the financial, legal and health sectors.

Just to put into perspective the results that can be achieved by designing a good form, below is a screenshot from one of our very happy clients after we had implemented a test on their Enquiry Form

They simply couldn’t believe how many of their leads were not only submitting forms, but also responding after being reached out to.

Keep reading on to see which test caused this!

What to look for in your analyses?

You need to use the data to make informed decisions. For example, if the analytics tells us that users are spending a significantly long period of time on a specific form field that does not seem to make sense, then actually go into the form as if you were a site visitor and armed with this data, attempt to complete the form.

To make these decisions, you need to be checking metrics such as:

• Completion/submission rates

• Error rates

• Abandonment rates

• Engagement rates

• Average completion time etc.
  
  

This is what we use to understand where in the form the issue is, what the issue is and how to fix it.

For example, if you notice that one particular field has an above average engagement time relative to the others, consider the following:

• Ensure there are no glitches or broken code

• Double check error messaging

• Consider removing the field entirely if it is no bringing in helpful data

• Consider changing the copy of the field etc.

As you can see, there could be many different solutions - the key is to test which one works the best based on the data you have collected.

REAL CASE STUDY

Opportunity/Idea: We wanted to test a one page static form that was on the site already against a 4 step pop-form (one question at a time)

Hypothesis: By creating a multi-step form we have enhanced the user experience to make the form fields less tedious to complete and therefore producing a higher number of submissions.

Takeaway (result):
Variation resulted in:
+57.08% in Form Submissions (78% chance to beat control)
+24.61 seconds in Form Submission Time (78% chance to beat control)

Win - Implement

In simple English, this means that when we changed the form from the one pager to the multi-step pop-up, the Form Submission rate went from 13.48%-21.75%, which is a 57.08% increase.

Conclusion

In keeping this post relatively short, I have barely scratched the surface as to how much your forms can be optimized. I would suggest looking this up further, either by chatting to us, or by reading up on it.

Zuko Analytics has an epic e-book on this topic, check it out here!