Advanced Analytics for Forms

The subject of website analytics is very important for every company that wants to gauge their online success.  Everyone who wants to succeed is doing it, and software like Google Analytics can provide you with a plethora of information about your site and its engagement.  Is there more that you can be doing though?  The answer is definitely, yes.

I’ve written in the past about A/B testing, the benefits, tools that are available, and how to use those tools. But how do you know what to change or what should be changed?  We’ve been using an online software called Hotjar for a year now, and today I want to show you a little bit about Hotjar’s Form Visualization tool.

Form Visualization is a tool that tracks engagement on a web form, field by field.  Through this tool you can see where users drop-off and stop filling out your form.  This allows you to potentially identify problem areas so you can formulate changes to try for improving your completion rate.  Let’s take a look at a particularly long and complicated form.

You can see above that straight off the bat, 45% of the people who get to the form leave the page without even interacting with it.  From there, it can get a little more confusing to interpret.  Each column above represents a specific form field, in this case we have 24 form fields.  Some of these forms have extremely high drop-offs, but many of these are simply form fields that are not required.  It appears as a drop-off if no one enters anything into the field. To get a better understanding of what is happening with these fields, you can click into each field to see a detailed view of the data collected around that field.  Paired with your own understanding of what the form is asking for, you can then find and exclude any fields that are not required, which have a large drop off percentage.

Advanced analytics for forms is just one example of how specialized tools can provide ways to not only evaluate the effectiveness of your website features, but also to identify actionable opportunities for improvement.

If finding, using, and understanding all of the website analytics tools that are available seems daunting, don’t worry. We devote the time and research to discovering and mastering these resources so you don’t have to. Whether you want assistance in understanding how to analyze and improve your website, or would like a qualified expert to handle it for you, the team at Upright has you covered.