Tracking what a user selects in a drop-down (or select) list/menu can be very useful. This is particularly the case when the selection immediately does something, such as initiate a download or navigate the user to another page. But even if there is no immediate action, it’s still interesting to know what selections users might be doing, if only to uncover yet another piece of the engagement puzzle. Here’s the Google Tag Manager way to do it!
The inimitable Craig Sullivan gave me an idea for a continuation to my latest post on form abandonment tracking. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to track the time users spend on your form fields. We’re going to use the User Timings hit type, and we’ll send the data for just one form. With small modifications, you can expand the script to cover multiple forms on a page.
Form abandonment isn’t always easy to define. Most often, it refers to when someone starts to fill in an HTML form, but leaves the page without submitting it. As a definition, this works nicely. However, with multi-page forms it naturally refers only to the last page of the form. Also, especially with government institutions, forms can be saved to be submitted later. Here, again, form abandonment must be reconsidered.
In this article, I’ll go over four different ways to track form abandonment in Google Analytics, using Google Tag Manager to setup the tracking.