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

I recently ran into this problem and realized that other sites might have the same problem. Fortunately, with Google Analytics there is a great feature called Goal Funnels that can track users through a process flow and put it into an easy-to-read funnel diagram. To take advantage of Goal Funnels, we need to take a few steps to get GA to start tracking your forms.

There’s a second feature of GA that we’ll use to put this all together and it’s called Virtual Page Views (VP). VPs allow you to trigger a page view generation on a page so you can see that event or action in your content reports within GA. For form elements on a page, what you’ll want to do is add an “onclick” javascript function to trigger the virtual pageview generation.

This is an example of a standard field you’ll find on a form:

To trigger virtual pageviews for this field, you’ll modify your code like this:

You’ll notice the “/signup_form/email” part of that code. That part of the code is what you will call the virtual page. I chose something that describes the event I’m tracking. You can name yours whatever you like. I could have called it “signupform_email” too, but I used the forward slash to separate the category and the label. You’ll also want to do this for your submit button.

Once you’ve modified your form with 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 Target Type, select “Top Match” for Match Type, and in the Target URL field, enter your virtual page view path. So if you created something like:

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 “required” checked so users must complete at least the first step in the funnel to count as a conversion. For each field, you’ll enter your virtual page view URLs into them.

Once you’re done, what you’ll be able to see is how many users complete EACH step of the form, where they leave it, where they go next, and how many complete the form.