One thing we get asked by our customers a lot is ‘what should our conversion rate be’? It’s a very difficult question to answer and, whilst we are well versed in using data to improve form conversion, we often fall back on ‘better than last month’. This is because comparing one form to another is often difficult, and comparing like for like has not always been straightforward. Customer personas and intent for every form are different, but we completely understand the desire to know how you’re doing when compared to other forms in your industry.

Recently the Zuko team has been doing some work to try and help answer questions related to this, and we’re now opening up our data for you to explore. We’ve tagged up our tracked forms and used Google Data Studio to bring you insights into how those forms perform (anonymised, of course).

Data in this article is taken from our form performance benchmarking report, an open and free resource to explore benchmarking data across millions of form sessions.

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The data used was from the last 12 months and then where needed was normalised for forms where we had less than a year's worth of data. Forms where the data indicated a problem in implementation were also removed (for example if zero completion events were tracked over a 30 day period or if they had less than 1000 views in total).

The two main tags that we used were:

Industry - regardless of form type, what industry are these forms in?

Form type/purpose - regardless of industry, what type of form is it? Does it allow users to buy something, apply for something or register for a service?

We then could look at the following metrics split out by those tags:

• View to Starter Rate - what percentage of people who view the form start to interact with it?
• Starter to Completion Rate - what percentage of people who start interactions with the form go on to successfully submit it?
• View to Completion Rate - what percentage of people who view the form go on to successfully submit it? This metric is often referred to as the conversion rate of the form.
• Number of labelled fields - labelling a field in Zuko is part of the setup process and is essentially confirming that a field belongs in a form and the Zuko user would like to see data about it.
• Median Completion Time - an average time that it takes a user to interact with and successfully submit the form.
• Median Abandon Time - the average amount of time a user spends in a form who abandons it.
• Field Returns - a measure of the number of times a user fills out inputs and then goes back to them later in the session. Think of these as corrections.
• Browser - the browser used when viewing the form.
• Device - the device used when viewing the form - split out into Mobile, Desktop and Tablet.
  

We’ve separated out the data into four sections:

About the data - this gives you a breakdown of what went into our analysis. You can see the number of forms in each industry, the device and browser share for industry and form purpose, and more.

Industry Benchmarking - see the averages for form performance across different industries. You can also narrow your selection down using the drop down.

Form type Benchmarking - see the average for different form types.

Form performance data - this report shows you how different different metrics compare against each other. For example we compare the number of form fields with the overall conversion rate, and compare the amount of time it takes to complete with the overall conversion rate.

There’s lots of data there, and we can start to answer some really interesting questions, like

“How does the conversion rate of application forms in financial services compare to insurance?”

“How many fields on average does an ecommerce purchase form have?”

“How does the number of fields affect the conversion rate of a form?”

“What is the device type share for forms in the travel industry?”

There are dozens more questions you may well ask, and hopefully this data is a first step in helping to answer them.

We’ll continue to look into the data and start writing up our findings, but we also want you to take the data and cut and splice it anyway you would find useful. We’ll also add more tags and categories where possible. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about what to do next so please do pop us an email with your feedback to benchmarking@formisimo.com.

For more general advice on how to improve your form's UX and conversion rates, take a look at Zuko's Big Guide to Form Optimization and Analytics.