Add Analytics to Your Online Forms
You may have noticed that when we announced our coupon codes for online forms, we also “snuck” in a new plugin called ‘Analytics’. It has been available for the last few weeks but we have held out officially launching it as we made tweaks and gathered feedback from users who have happened upon it.
Where is it?
You can add the analytics in the new “Plugin” section in your form’s setting’s page. It is similar to adding any of our third-party integrations, in which you can simply click “Add” next to the Analytics plugin. Unlike the third-party apps plugins there is nothing else to set up. We do all the magic for you!
What is it?
Abandonment Rate: By giving you insight on the number of views (total times people view your forms, 0ne person can view multiple times), unique views (total views on a form, multiple views not counted) and submissions we calculate the abandonment rate, or the rate in which people view your forms but fail to submit it. The line graph shows you your views vs unique views over time, so you can see quickly how your form performs.
Field Focus: The field focus area shows you your field values in a graph representation and shows you in a heat map-like way what fields your users are clicking on (the focus part). The graph represents how people move throughout your form and if there is a decline in the number of fields clicked, or filled out, as they move further and further down a form.
Why it’s important?
Insight: With the new form analytics feature you can start to better understand how people use your online forms. For the average person who just needs a basic form this may not mean much, but to those of you who are creating more complex forms, like online order forms or online surveys, you can start to understand what fields are really necessary to complete an order, or where in your survey people become disinterested and abandon it. It provides a layer of insight that has been lacking, but can now be used to better understand how to build online forms that your users will fill out and increase your bottom line.
Testing: This also gets you better insight on how to test your forms to maximize conversions. You can create two versions of your forms and test which ones get better results. You can try shorter or longer forms for lead generation forms, or even test different field names and see if people are more likely to fill out one versus the other. All in all it gives you a more powerful tool for those who truly want to maximize how they use Formstack and our online form builder.
We would love to hear your feedback on this and how you plan to use it. If you have comments feel free to leave them below or, if you have questions on setting up analytics or want to give us feedback contact our support team!
Related Posts
Crowdsource Your Idea with Survey Forms →
Forms Add a New Twist to the Brown Bag Lunch →
Support How-To: Adding Logos to Your Form →
Lessons from the April PRSA Hoosier Luncheon →
About the Author
These posts come from a collaboration of multiple team members! Everyone from marketing to development pitches in to share some insight on small business, online forms, data collection, and all things awesome.
Formstack is one of the most important tools I use. I’m a full-time webdesigner who uses it across an entire organization and a freelancer …. and I can’t say enough about how much of a game changer analytics and (almost) AB testing is.
Great work guys!
Thanks Steve! Much appreciated.
The analytics feature is a nice addition. Hopeful this is just a start though and the capabilities will extend beyond simple ‘field focus’ measurements. More detailed analysis of the new discount code usage rate and figures associated with it would be a good place to add future enhancements.
Must the embedded version of the form be used to track all analytics data? Usually I will build a custom version of the form for my website and match each field’s name attribute and the form’s action attribute to successfully submit to the Formstack backend.
I recently enabled analytics for a form built this way and it appears to be tracking views/submissions but not field focus. Maybe the IDs must match Formstack’s predefined values as well? Or I’m missing some new JavaScript include?
Hi Mark,
If you change the HTML and CSS structure of the form then the analytics feature will break. If you are just using the embed code you will be fine. You can email support (at) formstack . com if you have any other questions. Thanks!
The analytics feature is a nice addition. Hopeful this is just a start though and the capabilities will extend beyond simple ‘field focus’ measurements. More detailed analysis of the new discount code usage rate and figures associated with it would be a good place to add future enhancements.