Many businesses rely on their website to engage their audience and collect information for various purposes. From surveys, to quote requests, to lead capture or more sophisticated forms such as home loan applications, the need to provide customers with simple intuitive forms that can capture data in an effective manner and channel it to downstream systems is essential.

Until recent years responsibilities associated with the administration of web forms were primarily in the domain of web developers who were responsible for building the interfaces, data validators, and the processing logic that could e-mail or feed the data to other applications. Producing, deploying, and maintaining the forms was a somewhat cumbersome and potentially costly endeavor requiring the collaboration of multiple technical and non-technical individuals.

To help with this problem, a number of vendors have begun introducing tools and services that almost completely eliminate the technical gap required to build these forms, and empower non-technical staff to easily configure and maintain complex forms, and data capture workflows. These tools make forms development a breeze by exposing easy to use interfaces in which users can drag and drop different input components such as text fields, drop downs, and date calendars (among others) into single column or multi-column forms that have one or many steps.

This new generation of services is a boon for companies both small and large, as they significantly reduce the costs of forms development and management and provide them with tremendous agility in developing, deploying and maintaining forms and data capture wizards.

Some of these services, such as FormStack and Wufoo provide the entire platform as a subscription service, requiring customers to build and host the forms in their servers, and generate shortlinks/embed code in order to deploy them. Other vendors provide stand-alone solutions such as Appnitro's MachForm, FormTools, and JSN Uniform which require customers to purchase a one-time low cost license that allows them to download and deploy/integrate the entire solution on their own servers or as part of their applications. As an added benefit, these licensed solutions are fully open source platforms that can be tweaked as needed to enhance or extend their functionality.

Although assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the numerous forms management platforms currently available can take some time, businesses who make use of web forms and data capture workflows would be well advised to make an evaluation, and move forward with the adoption of one of these services as their benefits far outweigh the (comparatively) minor up-front investment required to transition over.

Google Analytics has been around for several years now. It has found widespread adoption among many websites, and for good reason, since it provides a trove of analytics tools that give site operators tremendous insight into their audience. Not to mention, deploying Google Analytics is incredibly simple, since all it takes is adding a single line of JavaScript to any website, and instantly, the charts and reports in the analytics system come to life, providing a wealth of useful information.

Once deployed, site operators gain access to a plethora of web traffic data ranging from top sources of traffic, search engine keywords used to find the site, the duration of visits, the popularity of different pages, and even the location of users plotted on geographic heat maps. For most websites, this out-of-box functionality is all they need, since most websites typically deal with simple content.

In the realm of E-Commerce however, the true power of Google Analytics goes well beyond the superficial traffic analysis trends, and provides site operators with broader performance data that is highly contextualized for online stores. With a successful implementation of Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking features, site operators can get a much better sense of what products are drawing the most attention, how different landing pages perform for different audiences, which formulas for product placement work best, and what product descriptors lead to the highest conversion rates.

As many who have partaken in E-Commerce ventures know well, in this world, customer acquisition is the name of the game. Drawing traffic to the website is worthless if your audience does not follow through with the carting and purchase of a product. This cycle can be rather delicate, but can mark the different between an operation that makes money and one that eventually closes its doors. Fortunately, Google Analytics provides the type of data and information necessary to make the most of an online storefront, and can help not only increment the number of conversions, but can also give you the insight you need to fine-tune your storefront in order to maximize the number of products sold with each visit.

Deploying Ecommerce Tracking for Google Analytics can be challenging, and requires careful planning, since the Google Analytics code requires custom configuration objects that must be driven from data in your shopping cart or E-Commerce platform. However, what is clear, is that those who manage to pull it off, can reap tremendous benefits in the form increased ROI and greater repeat customers.

To learn how Google Analytics can be optimized and deployed for your E-Commerce operations Contact Vexigen today!