Ask the Experts: How do I Create a Form…

Q: I know from my Google Analytics that I get a large amount of traffic to my form page, but nobody is submitting the form. How can I create a form that people will submit?

A: First, congratulations are in order!   You have a good amount of traffic to your website; people are getting to your form page; and you have an excellent tracking program in place!  So before you get to work on improving your conversions, be sure to pat yourself on the back for getting this far.

Now you need to figure out why your audience isn’t taking the next step.  Ask yourself a few questions to see if you might be guilty of some common form errors we’ve observed:

• Does the form submittal work? Be sure to run a test submittal periodically to be sure.
• Are you asking too much? Your form should require only the minimum amount of information that you absolutely need. If an email address is sufficient, please don’t require a phone number, home address, and first-born child as well.
• Does your website establish trust? Filling out a form and submitting it is to some extent an act of faith. If your website lacks an identity or clear brand, is built from a generic template, or jumps between multiple domains or designs, it is unlikely to garner the necessary trust for a form submittal. Think of it this way: are you more likely to hand your phone number over to a stranger on the bus or a trusted acquaintance? We believe that blogs are a fabulous way of building trust and relationships – the more personal, the better.
• Have you explained the purpose of the form? Most importantly, let folks know exactly what will happen after they submit the form. Will they get a call? An email? Or access to a different part of the website? Make sure that there is a clear and (preferably) compelling reason for someone to move forward with a submittal.
• Does your website have a privacy policy? Make sure that site visitors know exactly what you will (and won’t) do with their submitted information.

Work on improving the above problems, and keep a close eye on your Google Analytics information, and we think you’ll see some excellent results.  And if none of the above is a problem for you, then it’s time for some A/B page design testing.  But that’s another article, another day.  Good luck!

Ask the Experts: What could explain a spike in…

Q: Our website averages about 5,000 hits per day. Then one day a few months ago it inexplicably jumped to around 15,000 hits, but it was just for that one day. They dropped right back down the next day. I was wondering, what could cause this? We didn’t have any special events or press releases that day. Nothing out of the ordinary happened in our company. Any ideas?

A: There are various reasons that traffic on a site can spike in the way you’ve described. As you mention, you would often expect to see that type of behavior when there is an unusual event, press release, or other online promotion that might cause more visitors to come to the site. These days, a sudden, short-lived increase in traffic might be a result of getting some notice on a social networking system such as digg, reddit or del.icio.us.

Another, less delightful possibility is that the site was repeatedly hit by some sort of robot. This could be a search engine robot or an undesirable visitor such as a scraper bot (bots that are coming to the site to steal its content) or other spam manifestation. And if the site is dynamic, sometimes it is possible for a bot to get into an infinite loop and bounce around the website for a while, which could throw off your statistics.

Your best bet at finding the answer to this mystery will be checking your log files or website analytics program. I would start by checking referrers on the day in question – this is a quick way to see if there’s a link in some prominent website that you were unaware of. If this doesn’t answer your question, then you might want to review the part of your stats where it tells you what type of browsers or spiders (usually called User-agents in analytics programs) were visiting. Look for unusually high numbers from certain user agents or any other striking activities here.

And the big take-away from all of this is that “hits” is often not the most meaningful metric for a website! You might want to use this experience to choose some more helpful key performance indicators, such as sales or leads.