[thelist] tracking form submissions

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

>
>
>One of my client's has about 4 different contact forms on his website. When
>someone completes the form it is passed to a php script that emails it to
>his assistant. He now wants me to implement some sort of tracking on it so
>that he can find out how many forms were completed in a given time period.
>  
>
Why not  let your server logs do the heavy lifting?

Most server log file software allow you to create custom reports and 
email them.
Forms need a thank you page to not only give the visitor a visual cue 
that the form was submitted, but also acts as a counting mechanism for 
you/client.

form1 > thankyou1
form2 > thankyou2
etc.

the time stamp on the email does the time stuff
the thankyou form *count *does two things
you can check the number of thankyou against the number of email forms
this number should be equal.
this does two things.  it validates the form has been submitted as there 
is no other way to access the thankyou page since it only gets called 
upon successful submission. It validates that the form handler works. 
The server logs will tell you how many times the form pages were called, 
how many times the thankyou pages were called, and in what time period.
Secondly it allows  you to check the number of times the form is called 
vs the thankyous. This gives you valuable feedback in terms of the 
abandonment ratio.

When the form page is called 100 times and there are three emails and 
three thankyous, this is a clear indication that there is something 
wrong with the form.
Forms Suck!
They are hard to display visually, line up, style, and create. But they 
are where the *pixels meet the pocketbook.*
The Request Form which I call the Money Page
 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/money
is the most important part of a website.
Request and Contact forms are a lead generation tool. What happens to 
them when they arrive in the clients email is not the designers concern. 
A lot of pixel mechanics don't understand this or attempt to oversell 
what they can do.
All forms have one goal. To make money for the clients.
To do this, they have to provide the information the client *needs*, in 
an *order that the client can act on*.
Keep it Simple. Complex forms get abandoned.
 The most common causes are
too many Required fields:  Do you really need to know if the requestor 
wears boxers or briefs?
Unclear  instructions:  Why the information asked for  is important .
Information responsibility Disclosure: What they are doing with the 
information and whether or not they are going to keep it private.

The only Required fields should be Email, Name, and Phone Number. I say 
this as years of design and form building has shown IMHO that this gets 
more requests and less abandoment. More money for the client, more money 
for me.

Email: so that the client can respond in the same manner contact was made.
We won't get into why autoresponders are evil.
Name and Phone Number.
These are required so that if there is something unclear about the 
information in the request, the client can use the phone to make contact 
and have a name of who to ask for. This also indicates a willingness of 
the part of the client to go the extra distance to serve the customer.

The rest of the information that goes into a form should be germane to 
the client turning leads into sales. You can ask for all sort of 
information, but care should be taken when asking for it.
You can get great response rates when well presented.
 An example of this is the forms I do for junkyards. One of the items on 
these forms is the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) The VIN number is 
used to determine model, production, safety features, and other 
information critical to selling the right parts.

The Vin number is on the car or the title, both of which in almost all 
cases are nowhere near the keyboard. But in over 75% of the request 
forms received, folks take the time to either find their title or go out 
to the car and write this number down and put it in the form. 
Consequently, my clients sell more parts because they have this 
information which is not a required field.
Conversion is more important than counting.

the head lemur
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com