An Equation for Improving Your Forms and Conversions

The other day, we discussed the importance of not wasting you customers’ time when trying to get them to buy from your site. In essence, people do not want to spend more time than they have to during the buying process, so the more you can do to make that process quicker, the more likely you are to actually get a conversion.

I’m guessing most of you agree with this, and we got some good reader comments on the subject:

Less is more is a good thing to live by, so ask for less and get more!

Simplicity is so important when it comes to a website and retaining visitors. Additionally, people tend to be more visual – they want to see what they seek instead of reading about it (at least initially).

We talked about forms in particular, and i quoted Online Marketing Inside Out. author Brandon Eley, who recently told WebProNews, "Reducing the number of form fields that you put on a form dramatically increases the number of people who will actually fill it out. So only ask for the information that you really need. The same goes for a check-out process or a registration process. Make it as simple and concise as you can, and you’ll really increase those conversions."

Interestingly enough, the Bluerank team wrote a guest post for the Google Analytics blog this week talking about measuring the quality of an online form. They talk about how to use Google Analytics to prevent your form from hampering conversions. Essentially, they introduce a new metric called "Form Error Rate," and provide an equation for calculating this:

I’m not going to get into the mathematics of it here, I’ll just let you check out that post if that’s something you think can help you.

"The higher the Form Error Rate, the worse situation we have with our form," says BlueRank’s Tomasz Lewandowski. "Obviously, an FER of 100% would mean that our form is not working at all."

If you feel like your form may be holding back conversions, why not do the math and see what you can improve? Can’t hurt to try.