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Zuko software has helped optimize the conversion rate of thousands of online forms. This means we have huge amounts of data about forms allowing us to look at aggregated trends across individual industries, down to a form field level. We’re not precious about this data (as long as it is anonymised); we love to use it to share insights that will help others benchmark and improve the performance of their online forms. Whenever a business can improve visitor experience and reduce form abandonment we’re happy.
Our mission:
Make the web less frustrating, one form at a time
If you want to have a look at the aggregated data and play with it yourself, head to our conversion benchmarking page which has interactive visualisations of our datasets. Alternatively, we have also published information about which form fields cause most frustration + abandonment that might be of interest.
If you don’t have the time or just want the headlines, then the rest of this article is for you. We’ve picked out a selection of conversion rate statistics that will give you some of the most important trends.
Note: Feel free to rip off this data and use it wherever you want but do please credit Zuko Analytics and add a backlink to this article or the Zuko home page. If you can’t find a statistic you are interested in then feel free to reach out to us on support@zuko.io
Although many studies (including some of our previous ones) indicate a lower figure, the latest benchmarking across our customer base reveals a ⅔ completion rate for their forms.
Once users who visit a form but don’t bother to interact with it are taken into consideration, the overall completion rate drops below 50%.
75% of people who start an application go on to complete it.
Only 38% of users who interact with a contact form end up successfully submitting their details. The view to completion rate is even lower. Once this is factored in, the conversion of visitors to contact forms is a lowly 9%.
Checkouts are the broad category of forms that take the longest to complete: Three minutes twenty one seconds on average.
One minute thirty five seconds is the average length of time people take to register.
Users who abandon comparison forms do so after fifty seconds on average (this compares to one minute fifty eight seconds for enquiry forms).
Only 4 inputs on average.
No surprise to anyone who has filled out a form on a financial comparison site, comparison forms have an average 36 inputs required before they can be successfully submitted.
Note - for more details on what the form types referred to above mean check out this article comparing form type performance.
The view to starter rate for desktop is 47% compared to 42% for mobile (tablet is 41%).
Now, we turn our attention to specific industry sectors:
They have 71 inputs on average.
They take 8 ½ minutes to complete on average (even those who abandon spend around 3 minutes on the form before dropping out).
Local government forms’ view to completion rate is 85%. No doubt this is due to their strong local monopoly on services - where else are you going to go to register your planning application?
Their view to completion rate is 47% although their starter to completion rate is a little higher (60%).
Each form attempt includes 7 field returns to change inputs. Not unsurprising as the questions are often long and involved (think personal statements).
A strange statistic: On average, a user who drops out of a recruitment form spends one minute forty seconds interacting with the form. Someone who successfully converts spends one minute twenty five seconds. This is a clear indicator that users are getting lost in the form before getting frustrated and leaving.
Across the dataset, a completed form session has 5.6 returns on average compared to 4.6 for abandoned sessions, possibly reflecting the greater motivation of users who go on to complete the form.
Property sector forms take 7 ½ minutes to complete, the second longest (after local government).
Microsoft haters turn away now. Edge users had a view to conversion rate of 46.7% across all forms, the highest of any browser family.
Users of Samsung’s in-house browser converted from view at a rate of 40.6%, the lowest of all the browsers (possibly influenced by its higher proportion of mobile users).
And finally, individual form fields:
A further Zuko analysis of the most common questions on forms showed that the password field has a mean abandonment rate of 10.5%, significantly higher than the rest.
They fall into the next tier (below Password). Their respective abandonment rates are 6.4% (email) and 6.3% (phone number).
Users spend 7.4 seconds completing the address question.
Who forgets their own name? Not many by the looks of the data. The name field had the shortest average completion time (3.5s) and field return figure (0.3).
Whilst the common wisdom is that shorter forms perform better, this is not borne out by Zuko data. Take a look at the below graph which plots number of fields against completion rate. The trend line is flat indicating that the number of inputs is not the primary factor in whether the form is successfully completed. More discussion on whether form conversion rate is related to the number of fields is here.
If you need a primer on some of the terms used above you can look them up in Zuko’s form analytics glossary. If you are now convinced of the need to use data to improve your form you can download our step by step guide to do just this.
Zuko is the most powerful form analytics platform available on the market. Find out how to improve your form and checkout conversion by taking a product tour.
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