Form Submit Button Clicks

Which Forms Get Visitors to Take Action?
If you have forms on your website, I hope that you are at least doing the basics and tracking how many people View each Form and how many Complete each Form like this:

This will allow you to have a rudimentary view about how each website form is performing. However, one short-coming of this is that you only have two points of comparison. As a web analyst, I always like to have more data points to slice, dice and analyze. The report above answers the question: “How many people who see each form decide to complete it?” What if you wanted to know how many people who see each form try to complete it? That might be an interesting data point, since sometimes when you do a lot of Paid Search or Display Advertising you could be driving less qualified traffic to your website. Therefore, what I like to do is to create a new metric that I call Form [Submit] Button Clicks. This Success Event is set when website visitors click the button that you place on your form (duh!). By doing this, you have essentially created a wedge between the Form Views and Form Completes metrics shown above such that you can create a report that looks like this:

As you can see here, in the first report above we knew that only 786 of the 2,246 Form Views turned into Form Completions. However, with the second report, we now know that visitors to that specific form clicked the Form Submit button 830 times. That means that 44 times they tried to complete the Form, but were unable to for one reason or another (maybe Form Errors).

Dig Deeper With Calculated Metrics
Once you have this cool new Form Button Clicks metric, you can then create some fun new Calculated Metrics that let you dig even deeper. Here are two that I suggest: Form Button Click Rate & Form Button Click Fail Rate. The Form Button Click Rate is the number of Form Button Clicks divided by the number of Form Views. This metric shows you what percent of people viewing the Form actually click the button as shown here:

In this report you can see which forms on your website are doing a good job at getting visitors to click the button. Forms with low percentages might indicate that there are too many fields, poor content or a bad offer. You can use this report to zero in on which forms represent the biggest opportunity for improvement. I like to bubble-chart this data such that the forms with the most Form Views and the lowest Button Click Rate move to the “magic quadrant.”

The next Calculated Metric is the Form Button Click Fail Rate. This represents the percentage of times visitors click the Form Submit button, but fail to have a Form Complete. These people represent your “lowest hanging fruit” as by clicking the button, they have implicitly told you they are somewhat interested in you! You create this metric by dividing the difference between Form Button Clicks and Form Completes by the number of Form Button Clicks as shown here:

In this case, for the first form, about 5% of people who click the button don’t make it to a Form Complete, but the last form shown in the report seems to have some issues since 62% of Form Button Clicks don’t make it to a Form Complete. You may want to start doing some testing on that form!

As is always the case, whenever you create new Calculated Metrics you can see them as general metrics in addition to using them in eVar reports. Therefore you can set Alerts and see trends for both of the metrics described above:

What I like about these two metrics is that one shows you how good you are at getting people to click the button on the form (how good your offer/content is) and the other tells you how good you are at closing the deal once a visitor has decided to give you a chance. Those who have managed websites realize that there are very different tactics used to solve these two very different questions so having these metrics can really help you focus and use your precious website resources as efficiently as possible.

Don’t Forget Your Other Reports!
While the above reports hopefully get you excited, don’t forget that you already have many reports that can be combined with the information above to get even more value. For example, one of the reports I use a lot is the Traffic Driver (Unified Sources) report which shows me how each visitor got to my website. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could see Form Button Clicks and the above two new Calculated Metrics by Traffic Source? Well…you can! All you have to do is add these metrics to your existing Traffic Sources report like this:

Now you can see how each channel is doing! Looks like Paid Search (SEM) is generating lots of Form Views, but only gets 12% of these to turn into Form Button Clicks. If they do get someone to click the button, it looks like 55% of them don’t end up successfully making it to a Form Complete. This can be contrasted by SEO which seems to fare a bit better by getting 30% of its Form Viewers to click the button and of those 75% make it through to Form Completion. You can imagine how powerful this data could be and how you could use a product like Test&Target to come up with ways to improve these conversion rates by traffic source.

If you want to get even more granular, you can break this report down by the root traffic driver so you can take specific actions. In the following report, I can see the Paid Search ID’s that make up the Form Views and the other metrics and see how each performs individually:

Here we can see that there are some Paid Search keywords that are doing well (get people to click on the submit button over 20% of the time) and others that are under-performing (less than 15%). You can use these metrics to help drive your Paid Search strategy or possible automate this using SearchCenter. Finally, in this fictitious example, I have made row three have zero Form Completes, but a 32% Form Button Click Rate, which would indicate a major issue with the form that should be addressed.

One last example of leveraging an existing report would be the Visit Number report:

Here we can see that the Form Button Click Rate is pretty consistent, but up a bit in the 3rd visit, but interestingly, our Form Button Click Fail Rate appears to decrease over time. Perhaps the more time visitors take to get to know us, the more likely they are willing to deal with all of the information we are asking for on our forms!

Final Thoughts
Well there you have it. I always find it so amazing that adding one simple Success Event in the right place can open up so many new web analysis opportunities. If you have forms on your website, I hope this will help you learn more about your users and how they are interacting with your forms. Let me know if you have any questions…