Form Error Rate Used To Calculate Form Effectiveness

I’m a huge fan of Google Docs. I’ve fully adopted it as my work processing tool, to make spreadsheets and, more recently, to create forms that I can easily embed on a website.

That made Tomasz Lewandowski and the Bluerank team’s recent post on the Google Analytics blog all that more interesting for me. Using Analytics, you can measure the quality of an online form on your site. At first glance, I thought that was pretty cool – forms are an important channel through which businesses and non-profits gather information or measure levels of interest among site visitors. Then, I started thinking of the implications of knowing whether your online form was actually working.

Many Times, Search Marketing Efforts Are Measured By How Many People Fill Out A Form On Your Site

Whether you are running an SEO, PPC or social media campaign, a lot of times the anticipated end result of those organized efforts is to attract a visitor to a website and get them interested enough to fill out a form. In these cases, information and implicitly expressed interest is the currency or payoff. Forms should be designed to collect the maximum amount of usable information with the least amount of hassle for the user.

So, if your form is crappy and users have to submit three or four times in order to achieve a successful submission, imagine how many conversions you were thisclose to closing on and they slipped away.

Well, through Google Analytics, you can now measure the quality of a form using a new metric called “Form Error Rate.”

Here’s Google’s explanation:

“When we want to measure the quality of a landing page, we check the Bounce Rate. However, in the case of measuring the quality of a form, we introduce a new metric called Form Error Rate.

SubmitError: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form
SubmitAll: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form + number of successfully submitted forms.”

I’ll let the folks from Bluerank explain how Analytics tracks and registers errors. Every time I try to explain it, it comes out sounding like a distraught Wookie singing underwater death-metal songs.

The Point Is Clear – Use Google Analytics To Optimize Your Forms For Effectiveness

The thing that hit home for me was the ability to use Google Analytics to make sure your form isn’t chasing people away. Personally, I will only try submitting a form two or three times (maybe) until I’ve made the decision to head somewhere else for the information I’m looking for. To have a visitor come that far in the conversion process and split because of a poorly performing form is excruciating. It’s like a pitcher throwing 8 perfect innings and the closer comes in to give up a dozen runs. All of your marketing efforts up to that point were successful and your visitors were seconds away from confirming that success…and then, your crappy form turns them from conversion to lost cause.

PPC Buzz of the Week for Friday 3/5/10

Due to the 2 feet of snow we received up here in the Hudson Valley last week, plus about 2 and a half days without power, the Buzz took a little detour last week right up to Lowe’s to find a generator. In any case, I wanted to focus solely on conversions and the sheer importance behind identifying and tracking them when it comes to PPC.

Conversion, as defined by Google AdWords help center is “when a user completes an action on your site, such as buying something or requesting more information.” This is all fine and good from Google’s perspective, but let me take a step back for a moment and let you in on a little secret as to what a conversion is from the perspective of both an advertiser and PPC manager.

A conversion is a trackable action taken by a user who visits your site which you deem is a successful interaction, whether online or offline.

Conversions don’t necessarily have to take place on an advertiser’s website, even though most do. What about phone call conversions or walk-ins? Users that result in these types of actions typically are the most qualified and relevant to your business, initiative, and website. In essence, these users have just performed your holy grail of conversions. Anyway, we as PPC specialists truly appreciate the beauty of conversions and conversion tracking (plus the help it gives in performing necessary optimization).

But do you know what really grinds my gears? Clients, advertisers, websites that truly don’t appreciate or realize the importance of having a metric of success beyond click through rate.

I’ve made plenty of recommendations to clients and potential clients about doing some basic modifications to their website or engaging in other tracking initiatives, some as simple as tagging links with Google Analytics coding. Some people listen right away and make those adjustments, while others either don’t understand or don’t care. I think I speak for all PPC managers/specialists out there when I say “What don’t you people get?” There’s traffic being driven to your website, most of the time with great click through rates, and we have no idea how they are performing in terms of successful interactions. Of course this can all be alleviated if the PPC specialist has access to your site and can make the necessary (and approved) changes to remedy these issues, but most of the time this isn’t the case. That’s my rant for this week.

Now what about those people that truly don’t understand how to identify a conversion or the importance behind having one? Besides those recommendations, I’ve also heard people say “Well, I don’t really know what a conversion would be on my site.” There’s always a conversion for a website, it’s just a matter of taking the time to really think about what is most important to you. That’s right, you. So for those people that are having a hard time coming up with types of conversions to track, take note because I am about to provide (or at least attempt) an entire alphabet’s worth of conversions you can track.

-          Application Downloads/Submissions

-          Blog Comments/Subscriptions

-          Contact Form Submissions

-          Donations

-          Emails

-          File Downloads

-          Game Demos

-          Help Survey Submissions

-          Information Requests

-          Join a Mailing List

-          Konversions (for those German PPC managers)

-          Link Clicks (for those sites with PDFs, etc)

-          Membership Signups

-          Newsletter Signups

-          Op-Ed Submissions

-          Phone Calls

-          Questionnaire Submissions

-          Registrations

-          Social Media Conversions (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

-          Transactions

-          User Forum Posts/Comments/Reviews

-          Views of a Key Page

-          Walk-Ins

-          X (no clue)

-          YouTube Video Subscriptions

-          Zip File Downloads (you try coming up for one with Z)

Until next week…Keep on Searching!

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