How to Decrease Form Abandonment Using Form Analytics (Step-by-step)

Website forms can make or break your business. Forms that are well thought out and designed with the visitor in mind can increase form submissions, generate leads and grow your marketing outreach efforts. 

We’ve all experienced poor website forms. They’re usually way longer than necessary. It’s clear the person who created the form cares more about what they want to know than the information you need to provide to successfully complete a task. Bad forms are usually chock full of irrelevant questions that don’t need to be asked right then and there.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through six steps to determine what’s working on your web forms and what isn’t. 

By the end of this post you’ll be able to:

• Determine which fields on your form cause the most abandonment

• Perform form analysis to determiner if a field is causing abandonment because of a technical issue or visitor reluctance

First, go to Form Analytics in Lucky Orange.

From there, type in the URL of the page and launch form analytics. In the menu on the right, select Reports and then select Abandonment from the dropdown. You can also open a web form analytics report when you’re in the heatmaps section by choosing the Forms option noted by the blue clipboard.

The field outlined in red is the field that has the highest percentage of drop-off, meaning visitors stopped completing your form here. The percentage noted on the right of each form field indicates the number of visitors who dropped off at each stage of the form.

It's worth noting that ideal form performance is highly dependent on:

• Your industry

• The traffic source (paid sources will generally have higher bounce and abandonment rates)

• What phase of the customer journey your dealing with

• The offer sitting behind the form

And because it's so deeply tied to your unique situation, it's important you set your own benchmark data before coming up with form optimization goals.

Ideally, you'll monitor several hundred sessions through your forms before making any changes—but even 50-100 sessions can lead to some valuable insights.

Watch session recordings to see why users abandon your form.

To see Session Recordings of visitors who left your form from a certain field, simply click that field on the menu to the right. Watch recordings to make sure there isn’t a technical issue keeping them from completing your form. 

Certain types of fields, like passwords or address fields that require specific formats, can lead to high form abandonment. If you’re seeing visitors abandon on these fields, watch the recording to see:

• If the field has clear instructions for visitors, like required characters or formatting instructions. This includes things like dashes or parentheses for phone numbers.

• If they hover over placeholder text (inside, above or below the field) to re-read. This may indicate confusion and require a simpler placeholder.

Found a technical issue? Use filters to further isolate the extent of the issue.

Using the menu on the right of your web form analytics report, select Browser from the drop-down below Visitors that abandoned to see if your technical problem might be more prevalent on a certain browser type. You can also filter by Device type to see if the issue is more prevalent for desktop, mobile or tablet users. 

No technical issues? It could be one of these common sources of form abandonment. 

People often abandon forms because of missing or poorly written instructions. This is especially true for fields where visitors must use specific formatting like passwords, email addresses or phone numbers.

While we’re on the topic of phone numbers, that’s also a field that in and of itself often causes high form abandonment. People are wary of being spammed with texts or phone calls, so when it comes to choosing between a possible round of spam texts or getting your newsletter, they’ll often opt-out. 

Make your form more likely to convert by removing non-essential fields. 

Shorter forms tend to convert better than longer forms. If there are fields in your form that aren't absolutely necessary, consider removing them or moving them to a later step in the checkout process. 

This is a great way to minimize e-commerce cart abandonment—making it easier to complete a purchase.

What fields should you require on your forms? Ditch the fields that aren’t essential to that step in the customer’s journey. Don’t ask them for their birthday when creating an account to make a purchase (unless they’re purchasing an age-restricted item). You can always ask for more information after they convert if you need it to help refine your marketing or purchasing strategies.

Form still not converting? Launch a survey. 

If you made changes to your form but you’re still seeing high abandonment, use a Lucky Orange survey to get to the root of the problem.

Pair your quantitative data from the form analytics tool with qualitative data from a survey asking visitors if there is anything preventing them from completing the form.