Clients
Tracking Form use in GA
Post by Joe Law, 14 Nov 2020.
Web Analytics
Forms are often where the magic happens, a successful form completion is often the main goal of a website so it's vitally important that your form setup doesn't hinder your goals.
Often marketers will have visibility of how many people enter a form input page and how many people complete such a form submission however this doesn't tell us anything about what parts of the form are potentially putting off visitors.
Take for example this enticing sign up form.
Betray your family and friends, fabulous prizes to be won!
There's plenty of reasons why users might fail to fill out this form.
- Is the form too long?
- Are the labels confusing?
- Is there a required field which possibly shouldn't be?
- Maybe people don't want to betray their family and friends?
Without any information around where users are getting stuck we can only guess at the answers to these questions, this is where Google Analytics event tracking can come to the rescue yet again.
Using the javascript function focus() we can send an event to Google Analytics each time a user puts focus on a form element. For an example with a bit of help from J-Query.
$('input, select').focus(function(){
label = $(this).attr('name');
ga('send', {
hitType: 'event',
eventCategory: "Event Category",
eventAction: "Form Focus",
eventLabel: label
});
}); The end result means that you will be able to determine which parts of your form are putting off potential users, graphing our ridiculous example we find that users are dropping off on the email and telephone form fields as well as the final submission.
In this scenario we might want to consider whether we require both an email and telephone number and whether people really want to betray their family and friends. Once you've identified pats of the form that may be causing problems you can use this to make changes that really will benefit your bottom line.
