Optimizing Online Forms with Google Analytics Goal Funnels

So your site has a contact/subscribe/purchase form and the conversion rate for completing your forms is low. What is a webmaster/web marketer to do?

I recently went through this issue and realized that other sites may have the same issue. Fortunately, with Google Analytics, there is a great feature called Goal Funnels that can track users through the streaming process and put them into an easily readable funnel chart. To take advantage of goal conversion paths, we’ll need to take a few steps for your GA to start tracking your models.

There is a second feature from GA that we will use to put all of this together and it’s called Virtual Page Preview (VP). VP allows you to run page view creation on a page so that you can see that event or action in your content reports within the GA. For form elements on the page, what you need to do is add the ‘onclick’ javascript function to trigger the creation of the default pageview.

Here is an example of a standard field that you will find in a form:

To turn on default pageviews for this field, you’ll modify your code as follows:

You will notice the “/signup_form/email” part of this code. This part of the code is what you will call the default page. I choose something that describes the event I’m tracking. You can name what you prefer. I could have called it “signupform_email” too but I used the slash instead to separate the class and label. You will also need to do this for your submit button.

After you’ve modified the form with all the default pageview tracking code, you’ll need to go back to the reporting interface and select your target. Choose the destination URL as the target type, select “Match Address” for the match type and in the Target URL field, enter the path of the default pageview. So if you create something like:

You’ll want to put “/signup_form/submit” in the URL field in your target definition. Next, you’ll want to add a target funnel.

Make sure that your first step in the conversion funnel is marked Required so that users are required to at least complete the first step of the conversion funnel in order to count it as a conversion. For each field, you will enter the default URLs to view the page in.

After you’re done, what you’ll be able to see is how many users go through each step of the form, where they drop out, where they go, and how many people have completed the form.