Conversion Optimization: Tracking Form Validation Errors with Google Analytics

After all the effort of getting your users interested in your product/service, the last thing you want is for them to exit your site because form validations were an afterthought.

Losing Conversions from Indian Street Addresses

For the last few weeks at Learnhub I’ve been trying to optimize the conversion rate of our school application form. This form is lengthy compared to most and we required that potential students entered their home address.

As an experiment, we hooked up Google Analytics to track every time a validation error happened.

We were surprised to discovered that 20% of users failed to enter their street address properly and half of those users then exited the site. This was a big warning sign that our validations need improvement.

So we began to look into why this is happening in more detail.

We realized that our indian users were skipping the address not because they didn’t want to share it but because Indian addresses are really complicated.

In India, especially in smaller towns, street address’s are not as established as other parts of the world. If they did know it, it frequently looked like this: 83, LAXMI APPT., SEC-5, PLOT NO-27/8, ROHINI.

Asking someone to type that out is a usability nightmare.

From this data we now had a new starting point for improving conversions: by making the process of entering address easier or by making the field optional.

How Did We Track Validation Errors with Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics they have an awesome feature called event tracking that can be easily trigger by on-page javascript.

Our site was developed with Rails so when a field fails to validate, it automatically gets wrapped in a div.

So we wrote up a tiny script that:

1. scans the page for any divs with fieldWithErrors
2. grabs the ID of the form field
3. sends an event to Google Analytics with the label “Validation Error” and the value as the fields ID

The script (prototype):

With this data you can see see how many exited the form, what country they are from, validations per user, etc.

Fixing the Problem Fields

It may be beneficial to minimize the required fields to get that initial commitment.

Just like the old sales adage, if you can get the customer to say yes the first time it will be easier to get them to say yes later on for the bigger commitment.

Making fields a requirement is always a tough balance between hurting the forms usability and getting the information you want.

If you do decided to skip the tough questions early on, a process could be set up to get the needed information later on from something like a follow-up email or secondary form.

Either way it helps to have the analytics data to back it up those decisions.

- By Dan McGrady

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