Understanding Who Uses Your Forms

Musings of a Developer Who Experiences a Lot of Work Around Marketing

How are They Being Used?

There are many age old techniques on exposing how a user interacts with your page, a few are; web analytics, heat maps and click tracking.

Web Analytics

Everyone and their mother offers an analytics service or product. The first thing I would say towards this is; software be damned.

It's not Google Analytics or Sitecatalyst, Tableau or Adobe Insight, or any other service/product/software geared towards "analyzing" your visitors that will give you the information you want. It's how these tools are wielded, which a great analyst can do. Without a good analyst to tell you what all the data means, these services are useless and some very expensive. You need to empower your analyst to select the right tool for the job.

Your analyst should be able to reveal how a user reached a form, specific interactions and if they converted.

Heat Maps

These are pretty cool and fall into the category of UX. They can show you information on how a user scans through a page or fills out a form. You could identify potential roadblocks in moving through a form.

Click Tracking

Imagine being in person with a user and watching them interact with a page! Click tracking might be the closest you can get to this with out actually being there.

Click tracking services, like ClickTale, work by placing some JavaScript code on your page which records the movements of a users mouse and then visualizes that data over a screen capture of the page they were on. It's important to remember there are many unforseen issues that could affect the screen capture you see verses what the users saw. While not a 100% accurate it is a very insightful tool into the process and flow a user goes through when using your forms.

It can reveal a wealth of information. Although I feel it's value diminishes overtime as you solve the problems it reveals. The next step after this is A/B testing.

Who is Using Them?

Now obviously once a user converts on a form your aware of who they are. What about before that? Is there a way to find out information about your visitors who did not convert?

The first thing you must deal with is the anonymity of using the internet. While in reality there is a lot of information that can be obtained from a HTTP request, the foundation of the internet, notably a clients IP addresss. With this you can do a few things;

A revese IP lookup

This will determine DNS information associated to an IP. For a typical user this would map back to their ISP and provide only the regional data associated with that IP. Potential usefully information but not to the level we'd like.

Use a service like Demandbase

They maintain a database of publicly available company information. Which they provide an IP lookup API service against. This allows you to determine a users company if they are accessing your page from within their company IP block. Demandbase is a high consideration purchase, this level of company information will typically only make sense if your sales are high consideration as well.

Another neat thing Demandbase allows you to do is personalize your content towards the company you identify a visitor belonging to.