But very few website owners really focus on optimizing the performance of the web forms. You may lose your potential customers because of poorly designed web forms with unnecessary fields.

Forms are one of the most important elements of any website. Forms are used to collect information from your site visitors either by using a lead generation form, email subscription, or check-out form of an eCommerce store. Here is the stat from Formisimo:

“On an average, 67% of potential customers who start filling in a form don’t complete it.”

With the help of Form Analytics, you can understand what factors are responsible for incomplete visitor forms, so that you can make the necessary changes increasing the conversion rate.

In this blog post, you will be learning

• What is Form Analytics?
• Why should you use Form Analytics?
• Best Form Analytics tools
• Basic metrics of Form Analytics
• How to track Forms using Zarget
• How many fields should your Forms have?

What is Form Analytics?

Form Analytics will help you get detailed insights about how users are engaging with the web forms and what is stopping them from filling the form successfully. It will help you look beyond conversion rate and abandonment rate.

Why should you use Form Analytics?

Form conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics by creating goals based on Thank You page or custom events. However,  form analytics will give you much better insights through different metrics.

Below are a few questions for which you can get answers from Form analytics:

• Are you asking for too many details from your customer and is that causing checkout abandonment?
• How many visitors have interacted with your form?
• At what time during the form filling process, are your visitors abandoning the form?
• Which fields are often not filled by the visitors?
• What is the average time a visitor takes to register the form?
• Is there any issue with the form design or the number of form fields?

For those of you thinking, “Is form analytics worth your time?”, let’s look at the following success stories.

• Expedia eliminated ONE field (company name) resulting in a $12 million profit – Read more about it here.
• ImageScape increased their conversion rate by 120% by reducing their form fields from 11 to 4.

Best Form Analytics tools

You can implement form interaction tracking in Google Analytics by adding a few lines of custom code to your website. You can learn how to it here and if you are fond of Google Tag Manager read this.

But if you are not comfortable with those custom codes, many exciting conversion rate optimization tools are available to make form tracking easier.

Most of these tools provide Form Analytics feature along with other conversion rate optimization features like A/B testing, Heatmaps, Session Replay, Funnel Analysis, etc. You can start tracking your forms by simply adding the corresponding JavaScript code to the site.

• Zarget
• Hotjar
• Clicktale
• Formisimo
• Inspectlet
• MouseFlow
• MouseStats

Basic Metrics of Form Analytics

• Drop Offs By Form fields –  The fields where visitors left the form before abandoning the form
• Interaction Rate – Percentage of visitors that have interacted with the form
• Engagement Rate – Percentage of times a particular field is filled
• Form Validation Fail Rate – Percentage of times the form validation has failed
• Time Spent – How long does it take to fill each field and the whole form?
• Average Fill Rate – Percentage of people that fill every form field
• Refill Rate – How often people change the value of form fields
• Blank Field Rate – Percentage of visitors who ignored a particular field
• Conversion Rate – Percentage of visitors that have completed the form
• Abandon Rate  – Percentage of visitors that left midway during the form filling process

How to track Forms using Zarget

Zarget is one of the best conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools in the market. Form Analytics is part of their CRO toolset. You can sign up for free 30 days trial period (for up to 5,000 visitors) which provides access to all the CRO features including form analytics.

Once you sign up, add the JavaScript code provided by them into the website through multiple integration options or directly add the JavaScript code to the site.

Starters, Refocus, and Corrections Report – This gives insights on how well the visitors understand particular form labels and what information is to be typed. Ambiguous form labels lead to more corrections in the form of data. Remember, the higher the number of ambiguous form fields, the higher will be the rate of form abandonment.

Hesitation Time Report – This report is calculated based on how much idle time a user spends on a particular field. If the hesitation time is more for a particular form field then you can understand that the form field is confusing and the user doesn’t understand what has to be typed in that field.

Blank Report – This helps you understand the rate at which the users are leaving a particular field empty in the form filling process. The high blank rate for a particular field indicates that most users are not ready / hesitate to provide the asked information. Most of the time, mentioning how you will be using the collected information will solve the problem.

Note: You can get more insights about forms by combining form analytics with other CRO tools such as session recordings.

How many Fields should your Forms have?

This is the most asked question during the form designing process. Well, the answer is It Depends. There is no “One size fits all” answer. You have to think from your users’ perspective and decide what is information you need to know about your leads. Most importantly Test, Test, Test!

The proper combination of A/B testing, form analytics, and being clear on what information you need to know about your lead will answer all your questions.

Always keep in mind, “Ask the details that only matters”.

Recommended Reading

• https://conversionxl.com/reduce-form-fields/
• http://acquireconvert.com/conversion-optimization/

Where to begin

Choose and integrate any one of the forms of analytics tools from the above list. You might find some interesting insights into your website’s forms. Do let me know how this post was useful to you and what your findings were after using the tools!

The post Form Analytics – How To Improve The Performance of Your Forms appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

As bloggers, we worry about the high bounce rate in our Google Analytics dashboard. And it is one of the frequent queries I encounter from new bloggers.

“My blog’s bounce rate is too high, how do I deal with it?”.

Below is the Google Analytics dashboard screenshot shared by a blogger with a similar problem.

You can see that the average session duration is only 27 seconds and the bounce rate is 85.36%. But most of the time these bounces are not bounces at all.

If you are facing the high bounce rate issue in your analytics tool dashboard too, read on. In this post, I share with you one of the common reasons for high bounce rates and how to avoid them.

But, before finding the causes for a high bounce rate, let’s understand what bounce rate is.

What Is Bounce Rate In Google Analytics?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

Most of the time, a user bounces back from your website if they didn’t find your content as informative/useful/relevant to them.

But you should understand that a high bounce rate not only occurs because of your content, but it might also have to do with something about how the bounce rate is calculated technically. Consider the following situations.

Scenario 1: A user lands on one of your blog posts, reads the whole article, and leaves your site.

Scenario 2: A user visits any of your product pages and places an order over the phone.

Both the above cases are not exactly bounced, but according to the standard definition of bounce rate, they are considered as bounces since the users had visited only one page and left the site. Such miscalculations result in a high bounce rate.

What’s the solution to this problem? Adjusted Bounce Rate!

What is the Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR)?

Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) is calculated by tweaking the actual Google Analytics tracking code and sending an event based on the time spent on the page.

For example, trigger an event if a user spends a minimum of 30 secs (customize the time based on your website) on a page. This event will be considered interaction with a website. Even if the user doesn’t visit the next page, it won’t be counted as a bounce.

[Tweet “Why is adjusted bounce rate important? Because you cannot make better decisions with wrong data.”]

How to set up Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) in Google Analytics

Plain code

If you have added Google Analytics code manually, simply add the following code to your Google Analytics tracking code.

setTimeout(ga('send','event','adjusted bounce rate','30 seconds'),30000);

The above code will trigger an event after 30 seconds (30000 milliseconds). You can change this based on your requirement.

Using a WordPress plugin

Adjusted Bounce Rate WordPress plugin makes it easy to implement the adjusted bounce rate in WordPress websites.

After you install the plugin, you can find Adjusted bounce rate settings under the Settings menu. You can specify when to fire the event and event names in the settings.

Minimum Engagement – The number of seconds to wait before firing the first engagement. ( Typically 30 secs, you can decide this based on your site)

Engagement Interval – These events will fire for every specified time.

Maximum Engagement – The maximum number of seconds to track these events.

Adjusted Bounce Rate using Google Tag Manager

If you are using Google Tag Manager to manage all your tags, you can create a tag to fire an event after a specified time. Here’s how you do this.

Click on create new Google Analytics tag,  choose the track type as an event then specify the event category, type, and event label.

Once you create the tag, you have to configure time as the triggering point. Choose the trigger type as a timer. And enter the time interval you need this event to trigger in and choose the web pages.

You can check this in preview mode to see if the event gets triggered at the specified time.

Conclusion

You can check the impact of the Adjusted bounce rate in the below screenshot.

Implementing an Adjusted bounce rate is not the only solution for your high bounce rate problem. However, it provides you with an improved version of the standard bounce rate. And it also gives you a clear idea of how your visitors interact with your website.

I hope you have now learned how to adjust the bounce rate for your site. If you have any queries regarding this or would like to share your suggestions and feedback, do comment below!

The post Adjusted Bounce Rate and How To Set It Up – Explained! appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

With the help of web analytics tools, you can very well understand people’s behavior on your site and other information like their gender, device, location, the page they have seen, etc.

These data and reports will help you to make a smarter and efficient decision in optimizing your ad spends and marketing activities. You can also understand what is stopping your customers from buying your product or opting in for your newsletter.

Some of the things that you can learn are:

Who is coming to your site?

Where are they coming from?

What are they doing on your site?

Are they doing what you want them to do?

Which campaign gave you more conversion?

Still, many people are not using any of the web analytics tools because neither they understand their importance nor they know how to use them. The truth is, installing analytics tools like Google Analytics on your site is easy.

In this post, we will be focusing on creating a Google Analytics account and setting up GA on a new WordPress site.

Why Google Analytics

Many analytics tools are available in the market. Such as,

• Mix Panel
• KISS Metrics
• Piwik
• Open Web Analytics
• Adobe Analytics

However, Google Analytics has its advantages.

10 million websites use Google Analytics, and you too should fall in this category. This is because it is,

• Powerful
• Easy
• It is FREE!

If you ever wondered how Google Analytics (or any analytical tool) collects data, the answer is a small JavaScript code (you need to add this to your site) and cookies.

Cookies are the small piece of information stored on a computer once a visitor visits your site. These cookies are used to store different information about the visitors, such as the last visited date, log in details, browsing history, and time of the visit, etc.

Creating Google Analytics Account

All you need is a Google account to create a Google Analytics account. You can also use your business email id if you have bought it with Google.

First, go to Google.com then search “Google Analytics” and click the relevant link or directly visit the following link https://analytics.google.com.

Now click on the Sign Up option and log in to your Google account.

Before proceeding to the next step, understanding the Google Analytics account structure is a must.

Google Analytics is organized into three levels: Account, Property, and View.

Account: Account name implies the company name. Within one Google Analytics account, multiple accounts can be created (up to 100).

Property: Each account (company) can have multiple web properties (up to 50) such as website, mobile app, kiosk, etc.

Say, for example, an e-commerce company may have a website and mobile App. Both the website and mobile App should be regarded as two different properties under one account.

Views: Each property can have multiple views (up to 25). Views are used to separate and filter the original data flowing into the data. ( You can create a filter to exclude people visiting from a particular range of IP addresses).

In the next step, enter details of the website of the mobile app you want to track.

1.  Choose what you want to track. Either the website or mobile App ( the Default option is a website).
2. Enter the account name; you can use your company name for this.
3. Each account/company can have multiple properties such as a mobile app and website. Give names like yourcompany-website, yourcompany-App.
4. Enter the name of the website you want to track.
5. Choose a proper category that suits your website.
6. Select the time zone you want the report to appear and click submit.

Once you complete the above steps, you will be provided with the Tracking ID.

It is unique to the property which you have created. Below that, there will be a tracking code that you have to install on your site.

Depending on the platform you have used to build the website, it will change. We will discuss elaborately how to add tracking code to the WordPress site.

Different Ways to Install Google Analytics Tracking Code To WordPress Websites

1. Theme Options

Most of the paid WordPress themes give the option to add Google Analytics tracking code inside the theme settings itself. But, not all themes have this option.

Read the documentation of the theme you are using and use the option of Google Analytics tracking code if you have one.

2. Plugins

WordPress plugins help to customize websites quickly. Many plugins are available in the WordPress free plugin directory for adding tracking code to the site.

Some of them are Yoast Analytics, Google Analyticator, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, WP Google Analytics.

Yoast Analytics plugin has over one million active installs with the rating 4 out of 5. This plugin has options for excluding logged-in users, tracking external links, and tracking downloads such as PDF, DOC files.

You can also link to your GA account so that you can see your Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard itself.

Configuring this plugin is quite easy. After you have installed this plugin, navigate to the “Analytics” option in the WordPress dashboard menu, then click “Settings”.

Two options are provided to install the tracking code.

• Connect your GA account, it will automatically take the code and will insert it on the website (you have to use this feature to use the dashboard option).
• The second option is to enter your UA code (Tracking ID) manually.

You can also select the settings you want like ignoring users, if you are not clear, just leave default settings and save changes.

3. Header and Footer Plugin

Using this plugin, you can add anything in the header and footer of your site such as a script to your site, for example, Google Analytics Tracking, Facebook Pixel, etc.

Post-installation of this plugin navigates to “Settings” in the WordPress dashboard then, just copy and paste the tracking code. It will add that code to the footer of every page of your site.

Always insert the scripts in the footer (Adding any scripts to the header of the site may slow down website speed).

4. Add Code Directly

If you are familiar with editing code, you can use this option, but this one is not advisable.

Open the Functions.PHP (find it in the theme editor section) file in the theme section. Copy the GA tracking code and paste after <body > tag.

5. Google Tag Manager

Google tag manager helps you to organize tags on your site. As a beginner, you can safely ignore this step as of now. Later, you can switch to this. You can easily Get Started with Google Tag Manager with the guide by Conversion XL.

When you want to add more tags, that might hurt your site’s speed and performance. But, this tool will help you optimize the site’s performance by reducing loading times drastically.

Site speed will affect your conversion. Amazon says, for every one-second delay in page loading it affects one percent conversion.

eCommerce Tracking Through Google Analytics

The universal basic tracking code is limited to the data collection of the visitors.  If you are running an eCommerce store, you need to add extra code and settings.

This additional code will help to know the product performance and the customer journey from visiting the category page to the checkout page.

For that, you need to enable eCommerce tracking in Google analytics. Navigate to the Admin section of your GA dashboard, then select Ecommerce Settings.

By default, related products tracking will be in disable mode, turn on that option. Proceed to the next step.

In the next step, enable the enhanced eCommerce reporting option. Make sure you give labels to the customer navigation path in your online store which customer has to go through to complete order.

The usual customer path would be the Category page, Product page, Cart page, Checkout section, and Thank You page.

Define the customer funnel on your site so that you can understand which funneling stage has more leakage and fix it.

Once you have completed the above step, you need to implement code to send data from your site to Google Analytics.

You can send the following link from your developer to implement on your site. Otherwise, you can hire someone from sites like UpWork, PeoplePerHour for the minimum per hour rate to do this task for you.

If you have used WordPress WooCommerce to build your online store, Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics for Woocommerce Store plugin enables you to do the same.

Once this plug-in is installed, you will be getting options in the settings and you can configure it quickly.

Enter your UA code and website name, check the Add enhanced E-commerce tracking code option. Unselect “Add universal tracking code” as you have already installed that code, you need not add it again.

How to Check Google Analytics is Collecting Data or Not?

A simple way to check whether Google Analytics is receiving data or not is by opening an incognito window and then going to your site.

Now, you can see one active user in the Real-Time dashboard of Google Analytics which means GA is receiving your website data correctly.

If you have done these so far, congratulate yourself. You have installed Google Analytics code on your website successfully.

But, sometimes, you might not have got the data even though you completed the above steps. Learn how to debug the google analytics tracking code in the next section.

Debugging Google Analytics Tracking Code

If you are not receiving data, it might be because of the following reasons.

• The code might not have implemented correctly. You might have made some typo error. Check with your Tracking ID and the tracking code added to your site.
• You can check whether you have added a code or not. Clear cache and try again.
• To check whether you have implemented Google Analytics correctly, install the chrome extension, and try. Google Analytics Debugger Google Chrome extension.

Get Clean Data – Filter Internal Traffic

By default, Google Analytics will create one view name “All Web Site Data” which contains data about all the traffic to your site.

But when you want to understand about all visitors/customers you must exclude traffic from your company’s internal people like your developers, marketers, and admins.

For that, you need to create a filter to remove those visits. Google Analytics (GA) gives the option to filter the visits based on the attributes you specify. But, this option will permanently delete data from your account. So, it is recommended to have a backup of your website visitors’ data.

Create a new view in the GA dashboard by following the given steps and create a filter in that view to filter out traffic from your company.

Creating New View In Google Analytics

1. Click Admin
2. Select Views, then click new view
3. Give a name to the new reporting view and select Time Zone
4. Click Create view.

Next, select the new view you have created, and create a new filter using the following steps.

Creating a New Filter in Google Analytics

1. Click on the Admin
2. Then navigate to Filters (In View section)
3. Click Add Filter to create a new filter.
4. Give a name to the filter ( make sure it is easy to identify)
5. In the type of filters option – Choose Predefined
6. Choose to exclude option for removing traffic
7. Select the “Traffic from the IP Address”. As we are going to eliminate traffic from your company IP address range.
8. Select “Begins With” to cover the wide range of IP, that covers over all your company IP address.
9. You can find your IP address by searching “What is my IP” in Google. If your company’s overall IP is not changing in the first two parts of the IP address, then enter that. For example, if your company IP address always starts with 74.125 then enter this.
10. Next click Save. Now, you have successfully created a filter to exclude traffic from your company.
11. But, make sure that you often check this IP address range in case the range differs from the previous one.

Conclusion

Enjoy analyzing. Struck with any of the above steps? Or have any questions about setting up google analytics? Comment here or mail me.

The post Add Google Analytics Tracking Code to WordPress Site: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.