January 19, 2021 by Adrian Durow . CRO
I’ve analysed and optimised A LOT of websites in the property industry, more so than any other sector. Including a lot of analysis and optimisation of sessions & users who are at the end of their website journey. I.e. development, property & form pages.
So I thought I’d share some benchmark KPIs for a crucial part of these user journeys… forms!
Arguably one of the highest priority KPIs of any form-generating site. I.e. the % of traffic which clicks a CTA and views a form, and then completes a form:
Below are some actual form completion rates from anonymous property/housebuilder websites. It’s from a sample of 8 housebuilder websites that I’ve analysed over the past few years. Not a lot. But the below sample size is enough for me to be reasonably confident in providing benchmarks for completion rates of enquiry, appointment/viewing, and brochure forms on this type of website.
Also, there are lots of reasons why these %s are what they are. Lots variables at play when analysing form completion rates. For example:
* Sources – forms receiving traffic from more speculative sources of traffic (like display campaigns), might not have high completion rates.
* Routes into forms – sessions which are warmer, and have navigated from more pages, might have higher completion rates.
* User types – users who are further into their research journey, tend to generate higher completion rates.
* CTA wording – the words used on CTAs can have an impact on the likelihood of the form being completed. They influence user expectations.
* Overall ‘pre-form’ UX – The quality of the experience leading into the form view will heavily influence form completion rates.
* Overall ‘on-form’ UX – The UX of the forms. Number of fields & inputs. Relevance of fields & inputs. The validation. The UI.
By form type: appointment/viewing forms, brochure forms (with an address input requirement), and generic enquiry forms (including callback and registration forms):
Taken from this sample list of property websites I have analysed and optimised in the past few years:
There are lots of ways that these form completion rates can then further analysed.
They should also be segmented by other dimensions of data to get deeper insight. E.g. form completion rates by device, source, route-to-form, user type etc… They should also be analysed by input too. What are the form start rates? Which input do users start from? Which input do they drop off from? Which inputs are causing the most errors?
But as a very basic starting point for analysis, all forms should have view > complete funnels setup in Google Analytics, to make it easy to get an overall form completion rate:
