Online forms are an important part of most websites. Forms are the main communication channel between visitors and site owners. It’s necessary to ensure that forms are easy to understand and intuitive to use as they help organizing generate leads online. But how can you tell if a form is effective? What parts are visitors filling out? What parts are they not filling out? And how can they be optimised?

Google Analytics can help you answer these questions and optimize forms through customization of javascript tags to allow for tracking of events and virtual pageviews.

The first phase in optimizing forms involves working out a list of possible objections on the online form page and eliminating them. These objections could be quite oblivious, for example asking visitors to enter specific information such as their tax file number or bank account details. Another common client objection exists in relation to the length of forms. It is likely that the longer the form the less likely people are to fill it in.

Once you have eliminated all the obvious objections. The second step in optimizing forms is to then tag the forms with customized JavaScript so interactions can be tracked easily. One way to do this is to use event tracking and make use of the blur() function to track each time a field is completed in forms. If you begin to see lower completion rates for certain fields then you know that they are affecting completion rates and the form needs to be reworked.

Once this has been completed you are then ready to begin optimizing forms as you can be Identify where visitors drop out.