I’ve always wondered if I am using the full potential of my WordPress Contact Forms. The answer is that you never can really know. First you have to decide to use a contact form plugin. I use Gravity Forms. Next, you have to style your forms. That’s where a plugin like Gravity Styles comes in. Then you wait. You wait patiently for visitors to come to your site and use your forms. After a while, you start to check the, very limited, entries table inside of your contact forms plugins. You can see all of the individuals that have used your forms. You can kind of see how well your forms are converting. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a WordPress plugin that kept track of how many times your forms have been loaded, how many times your forms have been engaged, and how many times your forms have actually been viewed? Allow me to introduce to you a new WordPress plugin. It’s called FormWorks. It’s like Google Analytics for WordPress Contact Forms.
What is so special about FormWorks
If you’re like me, you have a desire to know all of the facts. You question everything and you’re always wanting more. Especially when it comes to your WordPress site and contact forms specifically. You do not just want to see entries and conversion number. You want to see how many time your contact forms are being loaded. You want to see how many people are viewing your contact forms. You want to see how many times a contact form has been engaged. Why? That’s just the point of the FormWorks plugin.
“Imagine having a clean and simple Analytics Dashboard, for all of your Gravity Forms, where you can see form engagement. Meet FormWorks.”
You would imagine that the number of views, engagements and form loads would be almost identical. You visit a website page. You see the form. That counts as a view and form load. You enter in some details into the form. That counts as engagement. You click submit and send some data. That counts as a conversion. So what’s the big deal? You would be surprised to find out that just because your form was loaded, doesn’t mean that everyone wants to engage with it. You would also be surprised to find out that just because the form loads, doesn’t mean that it was viewed. How do I know? because this happened to me. Until I started using FormWorks, I had no idea that I was using my contact forms all wrong.
I like the content of my website to shine. So I always put my contact forms below the content. That way, people get the information that they want. If they want more from my site, you can simply use my form and go from there. Until I started using FormWorks, I assumed that readers were viewing the entire post. I mean, why click on a post(s) if you are not going to read the content? It turns out that my readers are reading my content. However, they are not scrolling down far enough to view my newsletter form, on a mobile phone. My newsletter form is in my sidebar. The sidebar folds under the content on a mobile form. So, that means that my newsletter form is being loaded. It’s just not being viewed or engaged. It’s defiantly not making any conversions. That was big news to me. It took me a while to realize why the number of form views and loads were so different. The form loads were in the thousands. Yes, I get a lot of readers. The form views were less than 30. Without FormWorks, I would have never solved known about this and realized that there was a huge problem. But wait, there’s more!
[Tweet “Contact Form Loads, Views, and Engagements are complete and separate things. @CalderaWP #FormWorks “]
Big Woop. You forms have more views
I moved my contact form to the top of my sidebar. Now my form is receiving more views. There is still the problem of engagement and conversion. How do you solve that? What I did was simple. In my content, I mention that signing up for my newsletter meant that you got some bonus content. Just like that, I started receiving more form views. However, I was not getting the readers to engage. That was the next thing to figure out. I started out by changing the colors of the form. I used Gravity Styles to do that. I just had to change the class name on the form, and my form changed styles. It was easy. I waited a while. I viewed FormWorks again. I was getting a little more engagement out of my readers. I started to change the content on the form. I changed “Sign up to my newsletter” to “Stay Updated. Join My NewsLetter”. This is a classic problem that most WordPress website owners have. I waited again. I viewed FormWorks. 16 people joined in just 4 days. That’s a huge improvement in terms of form engagement.
In conclusion
FormWorks has helped me grow my audience of readers and subscribers. I didn’t know that I was using my WordPress Contact Forms completely wrong. Had I of not used the FormWorks WordPress Plugin, I would have never known that loads, views, and engagements are completely separate things that need to be addressed as soon as possible. To this day, I would have kept my newsletter form in the sidebar, at the bottom. I would have never thought to change anything other than the styling of the form. FormWorks has helped me in a number of ways and it’s definitely worth the price. I use Formworks on 5 sites right now. So I bought the 5 site license. Once I saw the benefits of FormWorks, I upgraded my license to the 15 site license. I plan on using FormWorks on every site that I can. I, in no way, have any affiliation with the FormWorks developers. I was not paid to write this FormWorks post and I was not paid for the FormWorks advertisement banner at the top of this site. I’m just a fan and I want to spread the word about the FormWorks WordPress Plugin.
https://calderawp.com/blog/2015/12/17/make-your-forms-work-for-you-announcing-formworks/