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Online forms are critical for businesses, serving as gateways for capturing leads, completing purchases, and collecting user information. However, with so many forms delivering a poor user experience that causes customers to abandon, understanding how users interact with these forms is essential to optimizing the user journey and driving conversions. This is where form tracking comes in.
Form tracking is the process of monitoring and analyzing how users interact with online forms on a website. It provides insights into which fields users complete, which they skip, and which ones cause them to abandon the form entirely. By collecting data on form interactions, businesses can identify areas for improvement and develop hypotheses for A/B tests.
Basic metrics tracked include:
Some more advanced form metrics are:
More form tracking terminology can be found here.
Form tracking is essential for businesses aiming to maximize their website’s effectiveness. Here’s why it matters:
When users find forms challenging to complete, they are more likely to abandon them. Form tracking helps identify these friction points, such as confusing fields or lengthy forms, allowing businesses to streamline and simplify the user experience.
Forms are crucial to conversions. They are where the rubber hits the road. Where users decide to hand over their precious personal information; whether they are signing up for a newsletter, requesting a quote, or completing a purchase. Form tracking reveals where and why user drop-offs happen, so businesses can make targeted changes and increase the chances of form completion.
Form tracking tools offer actionable insights based on real user behaviour rather than assumptions. Through understanding this, businesses can optimize forms based on concrete data, which can lead to more effective decision-making across various business functions, from marketing to customer support.
For businesses running marketing campaigns, form tracking can help measure their effectiveness. By analyzing user interactions with forms linked to specific campaigns, businesses can assess whether their forms align with campaign messaging and user expectations. Tracking form performance across different campaigns also allows for A/B testing, which can further refine forms and improve completion rates.
Research from CRO agencies shows that digital experiments based on UX research and analytics have higher win rates than those based on gut feeling or blindly following ‘best practice’.
By implementing quantitative research via form tracking, organisations and agencies improve the chances that their A/B tests will be winners and deliver a measurable upgrade to business metrics.
Form tracking can vary in scope and depth depending on the tools and techniques used. Understanding the different methods used to track forms can help you choose the right approach to meet your goals. Here are the main ways you can track your forms, along with their strengths and weaknesses:
Broad analytics platforms such as Google Analytics have not been designed to track forms specifically. However, if you have the skillset and are prepared to put in the time to tag up all of your form fields, it can be adapted to give you some of the basic form metrics outlined above. You can read how to track forms using GA4 here.
The big advantage of using a tool like GA to track forms is that it is “free”. They don’t charge you to use the product so it can be an easy sell to upper management if it’s not affecting the bottom line.
The downside is that much of the costs are “hidden”. Developer time doesn’t come cheap and you’ll need a lot of it if you want to get a workable tracking solution on your form. This cost isn’t a “one and done” either. Every time you make a change to your form you’ll need to get a developer involved or your tracking will be inaccurate and outdated.
Form analytics platforms like Zuko have been created specifically to track detailed form behaviour metrics. This means they have a number of advantages over generalist web analytics solutions. Typically, they are much easier to set up without a developer (Zuko installation only involves adding two code tags via a tag manager), and they will automatically adapt if you make any changes to your form.
The reports you can get from them are also much more in-depth than you can get from GA meaning that it is easier to identify and fix the UX problems that are causing customers to abandon your forms.
Of course, such software packages do come with a cost that will need to be signed off by procurement departments but, when balanced against the price in time and energy to try and hack together a GA solution, it generally doesn’t look too bad.
Session replay allows organisations to watch reconstructed recordings of real user sessions as they interact with forms. This method provides a detailed view of user behaviour, showing exactly how users navigate through a form, where they hesitate, and what elements trigger abandonment.
Session replays are particularly useful for providing ’AHA Moments’ - visual examples of user frustration that may not be evident from basic analytics. By reviewing session recordings, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of user challenges and discover nuances in user behaviour that other types of form tracking may miss.
The big weakness of session replay is that it takes a long time to get insights. You could be wading through hours of recordings before you find a usable nugget. That’s why it is imperative that the replay tool you use has advanced filtering based on in-form events to get you to the problem sessions quickly. For example, Zuko’s session replay allows you to filter by metrics such as abandonment point, fields interacted with, error messages triggered, return rates and many more.
Partial lead capture is a technique that allows businesses to collect data from users who abandon a form partway through. By securing information users have already entered, businesses can follow up with these partial leads and re-engage them through email or retargeting, potentially converting an otherwise lost customer.
Having said that, you do need to be very careful with this method. Capturing and using peoples’ personal details without consent is illegal in many territories such as those covered by GDPR. If you are considering using a partial lead capture product, please make sure you have taken legal advice to ensure you are not breaking any regulations.
Heatmaps provide a visual representation of where users click, scroll, or hover on a page. In the context of form tracking, heatmaps can reveal which form fields receive the most attention and which fields users frequently skip. Click heatmaps show where users focus their attention, including if they try to click on non-clickable elements, while scroll heatmaps can indicate if users fail to reach certain elements of the form due to their position on the page.
Heatmapping is great for providing a high impact overview of form pathways. However, it provides limited context for why users are behaving as they do. They can also run into trouble with dynamic forms which have different question pathways depending on the inputted answers
These factors can limit the value of heatmap tracking, particularly as a standalone product. Form tracking via heatmap tends to work best when combined with other methods like form analytics and session replay.
In summary, form tracking can provide huge value to organisations, identifying the friction points on their forms and helping refine the test hypotheses that will ultimately improve conversion rates and deliver more customers.
There are various ways you can implement form tracking but (all biases aside!), we strongly recommend that you use a software platform that has been specifically developed for the task in hand. You wouldn't use a steak knife to perform surgery so don’t expect that a hacked together solution will do the job you need it to. A specialised form analytics provider combined with session replay, heat mapping and other tools can save you time, quickly identifying what the issues are on your forms allowing you to fix them and enjoy the benefits.
Zuko is the most powerful form analytics platform available on the market. Find out how to improve your form and checkout conversion by taking a product tour.
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