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?
Pathing: Internal Search Analysis. (not just for page views)
When I was at the Omniture training class a few weeks back, the instructor mentioned that an advantage of storing the internal search terms in a s.prop was that you could get pathing enabled on the s.prop and you would then be able to see not only what your visitors were searching on, but how they refined their search.
Note: After you choose which s.prop you are going to use to store/capture the data in, you will need to contact Omniture Client Care to get pathing enabled for that s.prop
Where does your path take you?
jQuery FTW! Auto-tag static links for Omniture.
I am knee deep in implementing Omniture into our existing corporate site, and sometimes.... the path is clear as mud. The task of the day was to tag a set of links so that they would show up as Products in SiteCatalyst. The sub-task, ok maybe my personal bias, was to do so in a way that I would not have to babysit the page and keep updating the tags as new links were added.
Problem: How do you take a static list of hyperlinks on a set of pages and go about setting up some method to tag each of these links with a Javascript call to Omniture. Also trying to put in some type of future proofing so that ongoing updates to this file(s).
Environment: ColdFusion8 Server / jQuery
My Approach:
$(document).ready(function(){
$('#divToBeTagged a').each(function(i) {
var hrefval = $(this).attr('href');
$(this).bind('click',function (event){
omnitureJSCall('Product Category',hrefval)
});
});
});
I went with this for a few reasons, the main one being the ease of future updates to this page. I work on a small team of dev's and anyone else could be making updates to this page and with this method, we will always have the correct tags on our product downloads on this page. Is it perfect? Nah... but it does work well for me.
-RRS
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