Medallia : Quickly Find and Fix Conversion-Killing Experiences with Form Ana

Form friction can make or break website or app conversions. By turning to form analytics tools, brands can quickly spot - and fix - those poor digital experiences with ease.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Welcome to the fourth part of Medallia's five-part blog series, Tools of Digital Experience Analytics. Each blog defines and explains the purpose behind a fundamental tool or feature of digital experience analytics. So far, we've covereddigital experience scores,heatmaps, andsession replay. Now we turn our attention to form analytics and we'll wrap up the series focused on journey visualizations.)

Despite the popularity of digital channels amongst customers, there's a common obstacle that can sink experiences and conversions on websites and apps: online forms. Forms have become a major breaking point in the online customer journey as67% of customers abandon high friction forms, with only 20% following up with the company in some way.

To reverse this conversion-killing trend, brands need clearcut insights to find and fix those poor digital experiences on forms. And that's where form analytics come into play. Going beyond typical web and app analytics data or direct customer feedback, form analytics can provide granular form-specific insights that reveal exactly why a form may cause frustration and abandonment.

What are form analytics tools?

Often a part of a broader digital experience analytics solution,form analyticsare a tool used to measure the experiences and outcomes on any form-based submission page with input fields for users to fill out. The most commonly tracked form types are account sign-up and login screens, checkout processes with address and payment fields, content download pages, demo requests and contact forms, and others alike.

Form analytics tools measure granular, form-specific metrics that reflect the experience quality of every form across a website or app. All of these insights allow you to maken sense of engagement, abandonment, error, and completion - on both the form and field level - and quickly pinpoint poor experiences. And while form analytics work extremely well on their own, they can work even better when equipped with the right advanced features and in tandem with complementary tools.

One of the most important form analytics capabilities you can use is aForm Experience Score. It's a metric that automatically scores form-based experiences on websites and apps on a scale of 0-10, with 10 indicating an intuitive, easy-to-use, friction-free form. More advanced form analytics also come paired with behavior detection to reveal user frustration and confusion, plus segmentation for more ways to analyze form experience data.

Why should I use form analytics?

Most online customers loathe interacting with formsas they commonly foster clunky, error-prone digital experiences. In fact, only49% of users add details to an online formafter viewing it - and only 16.5% actually complete it. Since forms typically act as the final step on a website or app's conversion funnel, those poor experiences can directly jeopardize conversions and revenue.

Form analytics can help identify those high-friction forms that spark frustration with poor experiences - fundamental for optimizing experience and conversion. Instead of playing tedious guessing games when conversions drop off or abandonment spikes, form analytics provide a complete view into form experiences with a wide array of metrics available, includinginteractions, error rate, completion rate, completion time, and more.

With a Form Experience Score automatically rating every form-based experience, you can quickly determine exactly when, where and why form issues arise. And with sophisticated form analytics tools, the ability to segment by different user criteria and experience quality makes it easy to narrow your focus on specific forms and keep optimization efforts targeted. This means less time spent on investigating forms on your website or app and more time fixing them.

With form analytics in action, Provident, the largest UK credit lender,bolstered its form completion rate by 15%with a change to form content. Whether it's resulting from bad on-page content, a confusing form layout, or recurring field errors, form analytics enable clearcut and continuous improvements to form experience.

How should I use form analytics tools?

While form analytics may seem like another dashboard of data and metrics, there are a few key tips and tricks to making the most of this tool.

Best practice is to prioritize improving forms with heavy on-site or in-app traffic, and any forms with known issues like high abandonment or declining conversions. Follow this simple six-step process to make the most of form analytics insights to help you improve form experiences:

• Identify poor form experiences via declining web and app analytics metrics
• Identify and investigate form metrics indicating new instances of form friction
• Check experience issues reflected by frustrated behaviors tracked on forms
• Use segmentation to separate forms by quality, behaviors, and user groups
• Leverage session replay and heatmap tools to investigate and fix poor form experiences
• Rely on a Form Experience Score to benchmark and monitor form experience quality

What matters most when choosing a form analytics solution?

There's no shortage of form analytics tools available, but there certainly are key capabilities and features worth prioritizing. The best form analytics cut down on manual analysis and can make it easier on you to spot and fix poor form experiences. Here's a look at the six core capabilities your organization should prioritize in a form analytics tool:

• A dashboard of form-specific metrics measuring errors, completion, and interactions
• A Form Experience Score for simplified benchmarking and tracking experience quality
• Behavior detection alerts to pinpoint clearcut experience issues worth investigating
• Segmentation to easily filter through forms with specific criteria to analyze specific data
• Compatibility with session replay and heatmaps to spearhead in-depth investigations
• Extensive integrations with external solutions like widely-trusted web and app analytics

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