For all sites, not just non-ecommerce focused sites, having an understanding of how your site visitors are utilizing your web forms, which have become for many sites the primary method of communication, is ultra critical.
And here’s the amazing thing, with Adobe DTM, you can instrument robust form tracking without ever having to touch the underlying analytics JavaScript code.
Let’s say that you work at www.google.com and you want to get a better understanding of how visitors are using the Email Us form.
While you may be tempted to code a destination type of tracking e.g. fire off an analytics call when someone reaches the “Email Us” form URL, it is often much better to fire off the analytics call on the link to the form itself. Why? Well, for contact forms, typically a single form is reused throughout the site not only on different pages but often using different buttons with unqiue calls-to-action. It’s very import to the analyst that she has the ability to understand which pages and which calls-to-action are driving usage of the contact form.
We will make use of an Event Based Rule in Adobe DTM to send an analytics call to Adobe Analytics when a site visitor clicks on any link to the Email Us form. We do this by defining our Event Type as ‘Click’ and using a Selector based on the link to the Email Us form. This means that our rule will fire anytime a visitor clicks the link to the form, regardless of what page it’s on, what the button looks like, or what the link text is.
For our form, let’s capture four important identifiers:
- Form Name (eVar1) – What is the friendly name of the form that will be recognizable to the business?
- Form Purpose (eVar2) – What is the purpose of the form?
- Referring Page (eVar11) – What page was the form called from?
- Link Text (eVar22) – What link text is displayed to the visitor e.g. contact us, email us, get support, etc. Note here we are using a simple hack to dynamically capture the link text.
It’s one thing to understand that visitors reach a form, it’s another thing to understand how they got there.
In addition to capturing the key identifiers about the form and how visitors got there, we should also capture an event so that we can more easily calculate the conversion rate.
After successfully completing the form, visitors are presented with a generic thank you page. Here it is ok to leverage the page URL and a Page Load Rule to capture that a form was successfully completed.
And while your company may make use of a generic “thank you”, often that generic template is customized with messaging specific to answers the visitor provided in the form. In this example, we are capturing the unique messaging personalized to the visitor in a Custom Conversion Variable.
And finally, let’s not forget to capture an Event so that we can complete our conversion rate calculation.
Now, let’s put this great data into action using Adobe Analytics.
This report is great, not only because we can easily see the number of times the form was started and the number of times the form was successfully completed but because we had the foresight to capture a rich set of data about how the form was originated, we can report on things like the performance of the different CTAs we utilized to drive visitors to a single form.
Hopefully this post has shown why capturing a simple destination event for form completes is not ideal and how leveraging a tool like Adobe DTM can make it easy to capture rich data about form usage on your site — data that will make your digital analyst very happy.