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| 02.01.08
Getting Sales From Forms
 By Gary Angel
In the first installment of this series on Forms, I talked about the critical role of usability testing in the development of good Form processes on the web.
Even after a Forms process roles out, a lot of the focus of analysis tends to be on its basic operational performance. Is a Form Page broken in some instances (usually because of untested field edits)? How long does it take users to traverse the Form? What error messages get triggered during Form completion? These are all important questions and they tend to get a lot of focus.
But one of the key real-world aspects of Forms behavior - and something that you absolutely CANNOT test in usability labs - is whether the Forms are doing a good job selling the product.
Forms aren't supposed to sell the product, are they? As usual, I'm going to answer, "It depends."
There is a significant school of design thought that emphasizes paring away every aspect of the Form that isn't absolutely necessary to get the job done. It seems logical. An almost inevitable consequence of some of the principles I elaborated earlier: that every Form element introduces at least some small amount of friction. Reduce friction and you improve Form performance.
This focus on operational perfection, however, isn't always ideal. Particularly for longer, more complex Forms, the issue is NOT clear cut. As friction builds up during the process, visitors who aren't totally committed to the purchase may drop off. Adding Form elements that reinforce or build the commitment to the sale may have a positive impact on the process despite the addition of some Form friction.
You can't test this in usability. Testers aren't actually buying the product. So no amount of usability testing can ever tell you how much - or whether -additional sales reinforcement during the Forms process is necessary.
Are there any behavioral cues that can help?
There are. But this is also a place where testing will likely be the ultimate source of answers.
If you're looking to make a case for testing (which can be expensive in Forms processes) or just to decide if sales reinforcement might be in order, then you should focus on a measure we call directional abandonment.
When users exit a Forms process, their manner of exit can be very informative. There are really three types of Form Exit: exited the site, exited to the rest of the site but did nothing of interest (returned to home page and exited or backed-out to the page prior to Form Start and exited), and existed to the rest of the site and looked at something.
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This last category of exit is what we call directional abandonment. And it's extremely informative about what types of issues or concerns may be arising during the moments before a sale.
Don't expect Directional Abandonment to be an enormous percentage of exits. For most sites, process exits are mostly site exits. But even modest levels of directional abandonment can be very significant and can provide cues about the psychology underlying the much larger number of site exits.
There are different ways to look at Directional Abandonment. It's a web analytics task that is complicated by the inability of pretty much all WA tools to isolate the behavior of visitors AFTER an event.
In most cases, you'll begin with a Next Pages analysis. I believe this is most fruitful on a step by step basis. Different points within the Form will often yield different types of Exit behaviors. If you want to be fancy, start by building segments of visitors based on their deepest penetration into the Form. So if you have a five-step process, build a segment of visitors who reached Step 4 but not Step 5; then a segment of visitors who reached Step 3 but not Step 4; and so on. Building segments in this fashion let's you compensate for the fact that visitors will often slide backward in the Form before exiting.
Using these segments, look at Next Pages from each step of the Form. Throw out site exits and Form Pages, and you have a list of destinations. I usually classify these by Functional Types. So I'd look at how visitors left for Engager pages (like the Home Page), Router Pages (by subject), and Convincer Pages. Within the Convincer Pages, I'd want to look at how Exit To rates compared to Viewed and Entered From rates. I'm looking to find a pattern that suggests a specific Page(s) represents the area of primary concern.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Gary Angel is the author of the " SEMAngel blog - Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru. | | |
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