October 10, 2024

The Hidden Metric: Understanding Your Form Completion Rate

For dealers, every lead that comes through a website form is a potential sale. Yet, many dealers are only looking at lead volume, not realizing that there’s a vital piece of information they’re missing: Form Completion Rate or FCR. Without understanding this metric, dealers are essentially flying blind, making decisions based on incomplete data.

Why Form Completion Rate Matters

While lead volume tells you how many customers have submitted a form, it doesn’t provide any insight into how many people started filling out that form but never finished. This is where form completion rate comes in. It shows the percentage of people who engaged with a form but didn’t complete it, highlighting the forms that are losing potential leads.

Imagine you’re getting a decent number of form submissions each month, but you don’t know how many people started to fill out the form but abandoned it halfway through. Not knowing that data can mean missing out on potential fixes or optimizations. Is the form too long? Does it ask for too much personal information? Or is it just poorly designed? Without this metric, you have no way of knowing.

Improving Your Forms Using Form Completion Data

Tracking form completion rate isn’t just about gathering more data—it’s about understanding your customer’s behavior and making informed decisions to improve conversion rates. For example, if you know a form on your service department page has a particularly low completion rate, that’s an opportunity to ask questions like:

  • Are the fields relevant to what customers want?
  • Is there a better way to capture information using fewer fields?
  • Could we break up the form into smaller steps to reduce friction?

Armed with this knowledge, you can make targeted changes and run A/B tests to see what works best, rather than making random guesses. Ultimately, it’s about creating a better user experience that leads to more completed forms and more leads for your dealership.

The Role of the Automotive Standards Council (ASC) in Standardizing Data

The good news is that tracking form completion rates isn’t just possible for native forms provided by your website provider. Thanks to the work of the Automotive Standards Council (ASC), the data needed to track this metric can be pulled directly from GA4, even if a third-party vendor is handling the form.

Every time a user engages with a form on your site—whether it’s provided by your website platform or by a third-party vendor like TradePending, Gubagoo, or Run My Lease—GA4 logs an asc_form_engagement event. This event captures key details like:

  1. The form name: Useful for identifying which forms need attention.
  2. The department: Indicates whether the form is related to sales, service, or other dealership departments.
  3. The owner/vendor: Identifies whether it’s a website form or a third-party form.
  4. A pseudo user ID: Helps track unique users without revealing personal information.

When a form is submitted, GA4 logs an asc_form_submission event with the same information, allowing us to calculate form completion rates by comparing the number of submissions to the number of engagements.

How the ASC Standard Levels the Playing Field

If your third-party vendors support the ASC standard (as many leading vendors do), they’re already pushing these engagement and submission events into GA4. This allows you to have a consolidated view of all your forms, whether native or third-party, and make data-driven decisions to improve your overall lead conversion strategy

Final Thoughts

Understanding and optimizing your form completion rate is key to turning more website visitors into leads. With the right data in hand, you can not only see which forms are performing well but also identify opportunities for improvement. Leveraging the ASC standards in GA4 ensures that you’re not only tracking native website forms but also gaining insights into third-party vendor forms—giving you a complete picture of your form performance and ensuring that no potential leads slip through the cracks.

Dealer Insights makes it easy for car dealers to see form completion rates across all the forms on their website. Whether it’s a contact form, price watch request, or a third-party vendor’s popup, our platform provides a comprehensive view of how well your forms are performing.

Let Dealer Insights help you transform these insights into better results today!

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