Actions and Form Conversion

by Kent M. Davidson, MarketRuler

Frustrated by visitors abandoning your website at the first sign of forms? This article provides some helpful tips to avoid losing potential customers — as well as a bit of industry insight.

Any dynamic web site has forms that the user fills out. Often you are requesting information from somebody new, but visitors notoriously abandon web sites when presented with a form. You can increase conversion by:

Tracking when a visitor visits a page with a form on it. (View action)
Tracking the page after a form is sent by the user and a confirmation page is displayed (Submit action)

Tracking each of these individual actions allows you to determine your conversion rate, which is:

Conversion Rate % = ( # of submit actions - # view actions ) / # view actions

Your abandonment rate is the inverse of the conversion rate, and indicates how often visitors leave your site before a desired conversion:

Abandonment Rate % = 100% - conversion rate.

For example:

For a particular campaign, you receive 10 view actions, and 3 submit actions, your conversion rate is 30% and your abandonment rate is 70%.

Many site owners only track "submit actions", which is a mistake. The view action is key to this process because it gives you the ability to determine abandonment, and lets you review results when you modify your forms.

Now, assuming you get moderate traffic on your site, you may be able to manipulate the information you gather in your form to increase the number of visitors who are willing to fill it out. Remember: Users fill out forms all day long, and the quicker it is, the more likely they will be to complete it.

Some sites have incredibly long and complex forms which they ask their site visitors to fill out. In general, it's best not to ask too much of visitors on the "first date" so to speak. Armed with the above actions in your reports, you could determine that you get 25 visitors per day on your web form page, but only 1 actually fills it out, for a conversion rate of 4%.

So, you examine the form and look to see what you could possibly remove to increase conversion. Let's say you ask for Name, Address, Phone Number, Email address, and 5 questions regarding their professional area, and a few survey questions.

Now, to improve conversion, you run some experiments. When experimenting with your site to improve conversion, it's best to think about factors which affect your traffic, and how best to experiment in order to receive the most relevant results. In general, national holidays, the season of the year, the work week, and other related factors affect how much traffic your site gets and what users are doing. It's best to test over weeks instead of days to gather information which is more easily controlled and has a reasonable margin of error. That is, if you receive 1 form View per day, you may want to test over a longer period than if you received 100 form Views per day.

Week 1

Remove the 5 questions and ask only a single question which is critical to qualifying a customer. Review your reports each day. Say after three days, you see that of the (on average) 25 people who visit a form each day, now 3 fill it out. Not bad - you've doubled your conversion rate and you're getting one more person per day who you can contact later to make a sale. Let's see if we can make it better. Run it through the week.

Week 2

Place the 5 questions back in the form and only ask for Name and Email address. Review your reports each day. After this week, you see that conversions are 2 out of 25 conversions. Looks like those questions are turning your visitors off.

Week 3

Go for the minimalist form and ask for Name, Email, and a qualifying question. Conversions are now 5 out of 25 visitors to the form page per day. Exceptional. Less is typically more with web forms, and it has been studied and proven that short, succinct forms which ask for the least amount of information have better conversions.

Lather, rinse, repeat (Test, Track, Refine)

This process can continue on and on, and is best done when linked to other aspects of your organization. For example:

Sales may indicate that customers are requesting information but have the wrong impression about the products. Placing a statement on your web form outlining the issue will help you receive more qualified contact information.
Posting a brief statement about a no-spam policy, and unsubscribe links will almost always increase conversions when asking for email addresses
Adding a checkbox which gives the user the option of "contact me just once" can alleviate customer worries about being inundated with email
Placing a short, descriptive statement about what you plan on doing with the information can also help customers feel confident about giving their information to you

Some Examples

A good rule of thumb is less that 7 questions, ideally 3 or less to really make things easy on your site visitors. A good example:

Full Name:
Email:

Please sign up for our weekly newsletter. We will not share your information with anyone without your consent and unsubscribe information is included in each email.

Thank you for your interest in our services!

Hopefully, you're getting the picture on how you design your site affects your conversions. Tools such as ConversionRuler can help you determine problem areas of your site and give you the tools to fix the problems, and increase your conversions.

To contact us, use our help desk.