Someone asked on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum about HBX Active Viewing form overlay functionality.My experience
- The nicest thing about HBX is that whenever there are more than a couple of fields on a page, form analysis is automatically turned on. No fancy tagging, no after-the-fact missed tags, etc.
The Form Overlay works just like the "plain" Active Viewing overlay. It will show each form field with a color tone representing it's impact on conversion, along with a bunch of useful info- You might have trouble installing the plug-in on Vista because it requires .Net 1.1... In fact, Vista is not in the list of supported operating systems... So the latest version of Active Viewing doesn't work, but here's a hint: search for Active Viewing in their support center and you will find a link to an older version that works :)
Does it really work?
Absolutely! Really easy to use and quite revealing. I ran into a couple of cases where the overlay didn't work and it usually turned out to be badly built HTML pages: nested forms, invalid HTML syntax, or uses of JavaScript to alter the normal behavior of a form.Also, if the site uses a lot of CSS layering, you might end up with the overlay behind your form fields, which is annoying but you will be able to get the results anyway.
Analysis
Here's a couple of things you might find out with the Form Overlay:- Lots of abandonment on the first field? Might be an indication that people get scared of what they have to fill!
- Lots of abandonment on the last field? Might be an indication that people don't want to commit to the transaction (for example, in a shopping cart process, a lot of people abandon once they get the total price)
- Lots of abandonment on a specific field? Might be a badly worded question or out of context question (asking for gender to purchase a CD!)
- Gradual abandonment as you go own the list of fields? Might be an indication you have too many fields, people gradually drop off by discouragement.