Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
this does not make step 1 any less significant than step 2. the removal of any field,
no matter the resistance level, will have a positive effect. this is the simplest and most
powerful optimization tip in any form: remove fields that are not 100 percent neces-
sary, because in these types of funnels, there is simply no room for nice-to-have fields.
the abandonment is likely to be highly influenced by the traffic you are send-
ing to it, so you should not immediately assume that a high abandonment rate, such as
the almost 92 percent in Figure 12.5, is a complete fiasco. it might just be part of the
process.
you may be wondering whether you should focus on optimization fields with a
high built-in resistance. the answer is not necessarily, as the built-in resistance is com-
pletely impossible to optimize from your perspective of working on the form. or, for
some fields the resistance might be more closely related to trust in the brand than to
anything within the funnel or on the actual page. Fields that ask you to hand over your
email, phone, or credit card number are typically ones that hold less resistance with
highly trusted brands than with unknown brands. life is unfair.
Being able to identify the field that the visitor was in when he abandoned the
form is rarely of much importance. if you have done your basic usability testing, that
should catch the obvious mistakes of visitors unable to decipher just how you want
your phone number input.
the one thing i hope you've learned by now is that a high form abandonment
rate is not necessarily your top optimization priority. in the next section, you'll learn
how you can use web analytics in place of, or to complement, some of the other meth-
odologies we've discussed.
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Form Page Optimization
so far you've learned that there is much more to a form than the abandonment rate. i
expect that you will be catching data such as form error messages thrown, form help
messages thrown, and form mandatory field messages thrown. And you will be doing
your usability studies, but will you really be able to know just how well your form is
helping you increase revenue?
this might be controversial (especially in light of my earlier statement that any
field removal decreases the resistance and thus decreases the funnel abandonment rate),
but sometimes it might not be that bad an idea to sell on the form itself. continue with
caution, as this might work in the opposite direction as well.
the reason for selling on the form is that, while you have resistance on a per-
form field level, you are also building up prospect friction. some people who aren't
truly committed to completing the sale need support. the reason that this is difficult to
test using a usability study is that unless you, as a test person, are spending your own
real money and not make-believe money in a lab, you cannot re-create that emotional
level of friction.
