Form Abandonment

11Nov/090

Form Abandonment

NOTE: The code samples below are merely a proof of concept. This solution is not actively in place in any production environmetn that I am involved with.

I was talking to a fellow ColdFusion developer about a web site he was working on, specifically a registration form, and what were some of the best practices with form length and such that would facilitate users filling out the form and submitting. This is a common issue with web sites that will not be going away anytime soon. In fact the questions he had are the same ones I have seen in dozens of blog posts trying to figure this out.

How many questions to put on a form?
What type of questions work the best?
What question(s) scared off a user and kept them from completing the form?

I know that there are a few "Form Abandonment" plug-ins out there for Omniture and the likes, but from what I've seen the data you get is somewhat limited. If your form has 20 elements on it and the plug-in only lets you know what the last element with focus was, you have to really think about the validity of that data. How do you know for sure that the user filled out the elements in order? Did the developer of the form set the tab index correctly? Did the user glance at the form, click somewhere near the bottom and then bail? Did the user fill out half the form the shut down the browser?

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Tagged as: ColdFusion, Form Abandonment, jQuery, Omniture, Web Analytics Continue reading

21Oct/090

Omniture Developer User Group

Hey folks,

I wanted to let folks know about the Omniture Developer User Group that has started on Meetup.com. (http://www.meetup.com/OmnitureDevelopers)

The purpose of the group is to provide a region agnostic user group for those involved on the developer / integration side of web analytics. Please join up and be on the lookout for regional meetings as well as virtual-web-ex style presentations as well.

Our goal is to bring together the most serious web analytics and marketing optimization developers and innovators. We'll focus on discussing ideas and disseminating knowledge of how to innovate on top of the Omniture suite of products. Whether you're an established software provider, garage-based innovator, or junky who develops innovations while working at your day job, we're looking for you to share your perspective and create the next great marketing optimization products.

-Rudi

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Tagged as: Omniture Developer User Group No Comments

6Oct/090

Bing! You have inflated traffic numbers!

The past couple of months we noticed a very odd trend the the geo-location / city data that was being saved in Omniture. The great metropolis of Redmond, Washington was now the number 1 city of origin of our web visitors. And this was not a small lead, they were the number 1 city by more than double the traffic from the number 2 spot.

Trying to find an explanation for all this, I checked the twitter-verse and did a little digging online, but did not have a chance to really dive into the issue until yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tagged as: Bing Bot, BING Fake Referrer, ColdFusion, Omniture, SiteCatalyst, Web Analytics Continue reading

23Sep/090

“If wishes were horses beggars would ride”

Thanks to the magic of the internet & twitter I read a request this morning for a wish list of integration ideas for Adobe + Omniture, from @BrettError. I knew that I would not be able to fit my list in the 140 characters allowed by twitter, so I will list them out here.

Of all the Adobe products out there I use ColdFusion almost exclusively (not counting reading PDF's with Acrobat), so my list will be very slanted towards items I would love to see from an Omniture + ColdFusion perspective, that would make my job of implementing and optimizing the Omniture code & tags easier. That being said, this list below could easily be ported over to whatever development platform the site to be tracked is built on.

1) Tag library integration / validation within the soon to be released ColdFusion IDE - CF Builder. Much like the integrated JS libraries that can be added to other Eclipse based IDE's

2) Dedicated AJAX support - ok, so maybe this one has nothing to do with ColdFusion specifically but it would be great to have a defined/dedicated AJAX tag like s.trackAJAX() instead of having to use the custom link tracking s.tl() to track AJAX events. More and more of what I do is on RIA, AJAX heavy elements where a user/web visitor can spend a long time and make many clicks on AJAX elements without ever triggering a page reload.

3) Native integration with the ColdFusion session variables to by default populate many of the page specific variables to send to Omniture. (pageName, server, channel, etc.)

4) Built in tags to use the Data Insertion API to push data into Omniture as an alternative to the JS Beacon. Having this as a CF tag, might make it easier to accomplish #2 above.

5) Community. The Adobe ColdFusion is a loyal and active community and serves as a great example of the effectiveness of having a great active and supported developer community.

6) Enhance documentation by creating Adobe AIR versions such as this. I use this version of the Adobe Live Doc's all the time. Very handy!

So, there it is. My 2/5's of a nickel on what I would love to see as a results of the Adobe(ColdFusion) + Omniture integration.

-Rudi

PS. The original tweet request for the wish list made me instantly think of a quote my mom often repeated to me when I would say "I Wish...."
“If wishes were horses beggars would ride”

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Tagged as: Adobe, ColdFusion, Omniture No Comments

19Sep/090