So your site has a contact/signup/purchase form and the conversion rate for completions of your forms are low. What's a webmaster / web marketer to do?
Recently I ran across this issue and I realized other sites may very well have this same problem. Luckily with Google Analytics there's a great feature called Goal Funnels which can track users through a flow process and put it in a easily readable funnel diagram. To take advantage of Goal Funnels we'll need to take a few steps in order for GA to start tracking your forms.
There's a second feature of GA that we'll be using to put all this together and it's called Virtual Pageviews (VP). VP's allow you to trigger a page view generation on a page so that you can see that event or action in your Content reports inside GA. For form elements on a page, what you'll want to do is add a javascript "onclick" function to trigger the virtual pageview generation.
Here's an example of a standard field you'll find in a form:
<input name="mail" size="25" type="text" />
To trigger virtual pageviews for this field, you'll modify your code like this:
<input onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/signup_form/email');" name="mail" size="25" type="text" />
You'll notice the "/signup_form/email" part of that code. That part of the code is what you'll name the virtual page. I chose something that describes the event I'm tracking. You can name yours whatever you prefer. I could've named it "signupform_email" also but I used the slash instead to separate out the category and label. You'll also want to do this for your submit button.
<input onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/signup_form/submission');" name="submit" type="submit" value="submit my info" />
After you've modified your form with the all the virtual pageview tracking code, you'll need to go back to the reporting interface and define your goal. Choose URL destination as the goal type, select "Head Match" for Match Type and in the Goal URL field enter your virtual pageview path. So if you created something such as:
You'll want to put "/signup_form/submission" in the URL field in your goal definition. Next you'll want to add a Goal Funnel.
Make sure your first step in your funnel has the "required" checked so that users are required to at least complete the first step of the funnel in order to count as a conversion. For each field, you'll enter your virtual pageview URLs into them.
After you're done, what you'll be able to see is how many users make it through EACH step of the form, where they drop off, where they go after and how many complete the form.
This article was originally published at Web Analytics Traffic .com
