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How long do your users spend on forms?

How long do your users spend on forms?

22-01-2009

One of the great new features of Google Analytics is the ability to track events. This opens up fantastic possiblities for tracking user behaviour using ajax, flash and other widget-like behaviour on your website.

Although many websites do not necessarily have such advanced features, one feature that almost all websites have is forms. Tracking the behaviour of forms can reveal much about a users behaviour. Do they spent ages on certain fields? Which fields are most popular? How long does it take to complete a form?

The answers to all these questions can lead to design changes and improvements in how you gather information about a user. Although the standard event tracking functions are documented in a number of places, (most helpfully on Justin’s EpikOne Blog) there is very little documentation about some of the extension functions that Google provides. These include time tracking and mouse-over functions and are described in detail on Google’s Code site.

On a recent client engagement at a company selling insurance, there was an extensive set of forms used to gather information on a user prior to receiving a quote and then buying their premium. Exit rates at various stages in the process were high and so reporting methods to drill down into each page were recommended.

The process to implement is fairly simple. In addition to the standard Google Analytics tracking code, the page must also call in the timeTracker libraries in the <head> section of the page and create a timeTracker object.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.morethan.com/scripts/time-tracker.js>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var timeTracker = new TimeTracker();
</script>

Then for each form field to be tracked, the following example should be used

<input name=”txtFirstName” type=”text” maxlength=”20″ id=”txtFirstName” class=”genericClass” onfocus=”timeTracker._recordStartTime();” onblur=”timeTracker._recordEndTime();timeTracker._track(pageTracker, ‘motor-about-you-form’, ‘txtFirstName’);”/>

Written By Tim for the Google Analytics, Web Technology section Tags: event tracking, timeTracker