Every FormFinch plan has account limits that determine how many published forms, submissions and views you can create or collect. Of these limits both the views and submissions are calculated on a monthly basis and reset at the start of each month. To help you keep track of the amount of published forms, views and submission, we have created a monthly overview on the FormFinch dashboard.
A published form is a form that is collecting submissions, provided that you haven’t reached any other account limits. Although you can create an unlimited amount of forms, only a set amount of them can be published at the same time. On the monthly overview you can see exactly how many forms are published and the maximum amount of published forms your current plan offers. If you have reached the maximum amount of forms you can either close one of your existing published forms before you can publish another one or upgrade your account.
The views graph shows you how many times your forms been visited by your audience and compares that with the maximum amount of views your current FormFinch plan offers. Because this is a monthly limit the amount of views will reset at the start of each month.
When you have reached the maximum amount of monthly views before the month is over all forms will be temporarily closed until the start of the next month. If you want to prevent this from happening you can of course upgrade your account, which will increase the amount of views you are able to receive.
The submissions graph works similar to the views graph, but where the views graph counts all views the submissions graph only counts the amount of monthly submissions.
Ideally every form view will result into a submission, but sadly that is often not the reality. To provide insight on how many times a form is abandoned FormFinch automatically calculates the bounce rate. The bounce rate represent the percentage of views that haven’t resulted in a submission on a monthly basis, this number should be as low as possible. For example: your forms have been viewed 100 times but you only collected 25 submissions, therefore 75% percent of your visitors abandoned your forms which is your bounce rate.
There are several reasons why your users can decide not to submit a form after they visit it. Some of those you can’t control but others you can. To help you get your bounce rate as low as possible we have compiled a list of things you can try to improve the effectiveness of your forms.
Filling in long forms can be time consuming for your users, but sometimes you will need relatively long forms in order to get all the information you need.
The first question you should ask yourself about all the questions on your form will be if you really need to know the answer and if the answer yields the expected results on those submissions you do have. Especially look at the answers you have received on probing questions. When they don’t provide more information than what you have learned by the questions leading up to them, you might want to consider removing them.
Another thing you can consider is informing your audience about the estimated time it takes to complete a form. For example when you share a link to a survey. Although it might prevent some people to click the link altogether, it will make the persons who do click the link more likely to actually complete the form.
When a link to a form is not clear about what it links to it can also contribute to a higher bounce rate, simply because the form may not be the information your user was looking for. Also if a form is targeted at a specific audience, it helps to provide that information beforehand.
Sometimes forms get abandoned because they require the user to answer questions that they are not prepared to answer. This can either be because the user is not familiar with you and does yet not trust you enough to provide you with this information, they are unsure why you need that information or what you want to do with it.
Of course making those questions optional can help a lot in this situation. If possible it is better to remove them altogether, since this will make your form shorter, and that will have a positive effect on your bounce rate as well. Giving information about why you need to know something can also be helpful. For example when you ask for an email address; reassuring your users that you only need that information to contact them and not for marketing purposes can be the difference to an abandoned form and a submission.