Learning from Failure

[Larry Linson]

My attorney client created a piece of unique item of interactive content that provides a user with feedback about how their age would affect a social security disability claim. The attorney provided the "logic" for the form that reflected the government regulations and directives on the issue. A lot of work, and from I can tell totally unique content: no one is providing this kind of specific and targeted advice. To my mind, and certainly the attorney, very valuable content.

Dismal response. Since 6/1/22 this page - the page on which the form resides - got 621 visit. Only 19 accessed the form. And of that 14, abandoned the sequence questions before getting their advice/feedback about their specific situation. Of the 4 that got there advice (.06 %or so) none contacted the attorney.

I simply do not know how to go about assessing what went wrong here.

 

[tarantino75]

Hi, Larry! Did you promote the form on social media or via a press release? Can a user access the information from the home page?

When it comes to abandonment, maybe you should reduce the number of questions as much as possible. You can hire a user group to provide feedback too.

 

[Larry Linson]

No promotion of the form done. You are raising a traffic question, which is good to address. It could be more traffic would solve my issue.

But this is a page about getting disability when you are older than 50. Kind of doubt there is a mismatch here - don't seem why people who are not over 50 and interested in disability would be visiting the page. Its possible, but would you agree we are looking at a low probablity that young health folk are being drawn to my page?

My concern is: traffic is decent, its just that no one uses the form. Obviously we could have a number of potential reasons:

Form looks intimidating. Could have it more as a popup to test. That is, as it is now you can see the whole form. Does the user say, of geez, I don't want to fill all that stuff out...

I have attracted the wrong user (the user wanted is someone over the age of 50 and is either thinking about social security disability or has filed for it)

I don't really know what other options to think of.

I am looking for a criteria, a strategy, to analyze what is happening here. Thank you for your response - no one here is responding. Am I making this query to the wrong forum? At times I kind of feel like really meaty questions don't get any attention here

I am not familiar wth the user group idea. We are not talking big business for this attorney - no way my client wants to spend more money trying to divine why a patently good offer and piece of content is failing - unless it was in the context of analyzing a lot of issues not just this one.

 

[Tony Wang]

Without seeing the page and knowing more details, it's hard to make suggestions. For example, the overall design of the page will definitely have an impact on your results. How you display the form is only one part of the page design.

As for the visitors, it may be hard to be sure you're getting only the visitors you want. Have you analyzed how people are interacting with your page? Heatmap, recording, etc.

Are the visitors actual potential clients? For example, do you only serve local people but are attracting a national audience?

 

[Jon Hall]

I've seen that even good lead-gen forms perform worse and worse over time. Why? Perhaps because we've all been burned by them, spending time answering all those personal questions only to have our submissions disappear into a blackhole with no follow-up, no reward.

Even if your offer is good and you deliver on it, it's hard to disabuse people of their low expectations and low tolerance for risk--in this case, risk of their time and effort.

These days, I like the approach of turning traditional lead-gen forms and "logic" into messaging flows. The idea is to bring your lead through a series of micro-commitments, answering each question in turn, with feedback and encouragement along the way to reduce abandonment.

While you can do this on the web (think: online quiz), there are considerable benefits to moving such an interaction into a messaging channel like SMS or Facebook Messenger where abandonment is much harder. If the user stalls, you can still engage them and convert them

 

[Jon Hall]

And of course, what @Tony Wang said!

Without seeing the page and knowing more details, it's hard to make suggestions.

 

[PaulSteinbrueck]

Have you looked at GA & GSC to examine the source of the traffic and keywords being used to get to the page? People could be going to the page because they're expecting something else, something unrelated to tool you're providing.