Underused Google Analytics Features - Part Seven

04.09.2009 Posted in Analytics

Do you ever just wish you knew which part of your forms were putting users off? You don’t? Well ok. But now you’ve thought about it, do you think it would be useful? Of course you do. Because if you could know at what stage users were giving up you’d know how to change things to get more people giving you their details, expressing an interest, signing up for your newsletter, etc. And more interested people is better!

Well there is a way to do it. It’s straightforward, but not the easiest thing to implement. You have to be willing to change some of the code on your forms, but nothing too terrifying.

Using the input box onBlur event you can specify that the input box has lost focus. When that onBlur event is called, you then send Google Analytics a virtual pageview to tell it that the action has been completed.

On every textbox (or checkbox, or anything else) on your form, in the onBlur event add the code:

pageTracker.
_trackPageview(”/formA/stageOne”);

Replace ‘formA’ with the name of the form you’re interested in, and ’stageOne’ with something descriptive about what box the user has just interacted with. This could be ‘FirstName’ or ‘EmailAddress’ or similar.

The effect of these changes will be that when a person clicks out of a part of your form (i.e. they have filled something in) then it will tell Google Analytics that an entire new (false) page was loaded. You can then monitor those in GA.

You can look at the content report and filter (in the search box at the bottom) for only pages containing ‘/formA/’ and you would then see exactly how many people filled in each section of your form. To get even more clever with it, create a new goal for submission of the form and give it a funnel, where each stage is the next box in the form. That way you can visually see how many people have dropped out from your form at each stage.

However, there are two major things to remember here:

You will see a pageview every time a person clicks out of a box. Whether they have filled something in or not. So if they go back and delete something, or they leave a field blank, it’ll still show up.
Google’s policies don’t allow you to collect the information in the form. So don’t pass the actual form contents. If the person submits the form, you’ll have them anyway.

The end result for you is to be able to see why your forms might be turning people away in a more specific way than “it’s too long” or “I didn’t understand it”. Get the information you want about which parts your visitors don’t want to fill in, because you can improve your signups/registrations/enquiries if they don’t wimp out.