1. Website Planet
  2. >
  3. Blog
  4. >
  5. How Zuko Analytics Solves Online Form Abandonment: Q/A with Managing Director Alun Lucas
How Zuko Analytics Solves Online Form Abandonment: Q/A with Managing Director Alun Lucas

How Zuko Analytics Solves Online Form Abandonment: Q/A with Managing Director Alun Lucas

Bethenny Carl Written by:
Businesses lose millions of dollars every year from customers abandoning their online forms and checkouts.

Even worse, most have no idea when, where and why this happens.

Zuko Analytics has developed a form analytics platform that has helped hundreds of customers all around the world understand how potential customers behave on their online forms and checkouts. They have been recently awarded as “Best Vendor for Customer Service” at the Experimentation Elite Awards in 2023.

In this interview for Website Planet, I asked Alun Lucas, Managing Director of Zuko Analytics, how Zuko helps understand when, where and why people are abandoning online forms to help you fix your website’s UX and increase completion rates.

P.S. he also shared his POV on what is the REAL role of AI in marketing analytics now and how it’s going to evolve.

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

Businesses know that customers are dropping out during the process of completing their online forms. What they don’t know is exactly where they abandoned and why they left. This lack of knowledge costs companies millions of dollars every year (the average completion rate of all forms is only 45%).

Most commonly, businesses might try to fill this knowledge gap by using a general product such as Google Analytics (GA), which is not designed to track detailed form behavior, so it can only provide very basic metrics.

Moreover, you will need to invest in expensive engineering resources to hack together such a basic solution and, should you make any changes to the form, you’ll have to start the tagging process all over again.

Zuko is the only specialist form analytics platform on the market that can be set up without developers and able to adapt every time you alter your forms.

“I have only seen one half decent Google Analytics form integration after looking at thousands of sites and analytics setups. There’s a reason why. It’s a giant pain in the backside to build and maintain. Just install Zuko instead and save yourself the hassle.”

‍Craig Sullivan, Optimizer-in-Chief, Optimal Visit

What makes Zuko form reporting more in-depth and flexible than any other analytics product is the ability to answer questions like:
  • Which doubts and concerns cause my visitors to abandon?
  • How do visitors flow through the form?
  • What error messages are being shown, and how often?
  • How does visitor behavior vary by device?
  • Is the form broken? When did it happen?
Zuko Analytics

Zuko Analytics

Zuko Analytics

P.S. Zuko just launched a form builder product based on decades of form optimization experience, taking the learnings from their behavioral data to design form patterns that deliver a smooth user journey and maximize completion rates.

Which types of companies benefit the most from what you offer?

The companies that tend to benefit the most from Zuko tend to have one or more of these three issues:
  • Forms that ask a number of complicated or sensitive questions
  • A high cost of customer acquisition
  • A high customer lifetime value
Financial services companies (insurance, credit cards, loans, banking FX trading) have all of these factors so it’s no surprise that this is our largest client sector. These businesses use Zuko to reduce abandonment on their forms, driving more leads and, ultimately delivering higher, and cheaper, customer acquisition.

Having said this, we also have a strong presence in the gaming / gambling sector (high customer value) and education (long, complicated forms) as well as eCommerce, agency and healthcare.

“As a specialist Conversion Rate Optimization agency, we need the best possible tools at our disposal to help our clients understand online customer behavior. In terms of form analytics, nothing comes close to the flexibility and power of Zuko. We’ve found it an invaluable tool for getting insight, and will continue to use Zuko for all our clients where their forms are a vital part of the online buying journey”

Garret Cunningham, COO, Endless Gain

What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

Our customers tend to be reliant on their forms for their customer acquisition so they want the best tool in the market to improve them. They come to us when they realize that no other product (typically GA) will give them the depth of insight they need to drive their conversion rates higher.

Typically, when asked what they like about Zuko they’ll talk about the greater depth of reporting that allows them to dig down and pinpoint issues on a granular level (is there a UX issue on a particular device type, for example) as well as the ease of set-up that doesn’t require additional tagging or development work.

“Zuko has enabled us to improve visitor-to-conversion rates for a series of clients. An example of this is a website increasing their click to enquiry rate by 25% through form changes highlighted to us through Zuko as ‘sticking points’.”

Steve Tarbard, Owner, Beyondclicks.co.uk

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

We operate in a focused niche so outbound sales and ‘spray and pray’ marketing is not very efficient for us.

Whilst we still dabble in targeted versions of the above methods, our greatest success has come via three inbound marketing channels:
  • Content creation – We aim to be the authority on form optimization + analytics so if someone is aware that they have a sub-optimal form and wants to do something about it, they will eventually find us. This has manifested itself in projects like our definitive eBook guide to form optimization and analytics, consistent blog posts on relevant topics and joint webinars with industry experts / complementary SaaS products.
  • Social – The content we create is amplified through our social accounts, particularly my Linked In channel. This enables us to position ourselves as the expert in form design and push awareness of the proposition without being too ‘salesy’
  • SEO – We look to dominate our space and our content strategy has delivered top search rankings for our key terms like ‘Form Analytics’ and ‘Form Optimization’
In addition, we’ve looked to grow our audience through integrations and partnerships with complementary software platforms like Jotform, Convert.com, WP forms and Sitespect.

“Zuko is a powerful tool as it offers great insight on how best to optimize our registration platform. By using it, we have been able to align our KPIs and minimize errors in order to provide a flawless user experience. The platform is also very easy to use.”

Roberta Grech, Product Tracking Specialist, Tipico

What tools are you using to run your business and daily activities?

The key tools we use are:
  • AWS – to host and deliver our web applications.
  • Hubspot – great for managing leads and email campaigns. We’d love to go deeper with its capabilities but it starts to get expensive quickly!
  • Zapier – allows us to automate much of our day-to-day business processes. We use it to alert account managers when prospects take a particular action and to help populate Hubspot.
  • Slack – critical for us to maintain communication in our hybrid workplace.
  • Chart Mogul – understanding our KPIs is crucial for us to make informed decisions. CM provides up to the minute information on customer numbers and recurring revenue. It also lets us dig deeper to uncover underlying patterns.
  • Chat GPT – we’re just scratching the surface of this for sales content creation (creating messages that appeal to a particular individual).

What perspective do you have about where your industry is headed?

Marketing analytics has historically been under-appreciated (IMHO) and one of the key challenges is getting to actionable insights quickly and not just displaying numbers for numbers sake. Many businesses don’t have the internal expertise to interpret the figures and translate them into understandable recommendations.

We’ve historically tackled this challenge, as have many SaaS companies, with a customer success team to act as a quasi-analyst helping customers to get the most out of Zuko. The advent of AI and large language models changes that – It will enable tools to do most of the analysis for you, summarize the insights and give clear recommendations for action.

That said, we’re not quite there yet. The current AI models are still terrible at calculation, let alone interpreting numbers, often preferring to outright lie than give a correct answer. It is, however, only a matter of time before the robots evolve to the position where they improve analytical effectiveness a hundredfold.

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

As noted above, we’ve just launched a form builder, leveraging our years of form design experience to let companies easily render a great form experience on their website. This ties into our core forms competency but also broadens our potential audience and provides a new distribution channel for our analytics product (which comes as standard with the builder).

On top of that, we’re conscious that we’re sitting on a mountain of behavioral data that must be valuable to someone. We’ve created a webhook that can push out all the interaction events that take place on a form and are speaking with interested parties to develop use cases – lead scoring, fraud detection and predictive metrics are amongst the potential uses for the data.

Finally, we’re always working to stay on top of developments in AI. We regularly run proof of concept projects to try and work towards the automated insights mentioned in the answer to the previous question.

Are you a consultant or small agency?

Did you know that you can use Zuko Analytics for free to discover the friction points in online forms & checkouts?

You just have to sign up to Zuko’s partner programme 👇

https://www.zuko.io/zuko-partner-programme/zuko-partner-programme-apply

Rate this Article
4.0 Voted by 2 users
You already voted! Undo
This field is required Maximal length of comment is equal 80000 chars Minimal length of comment is equal 10 chars
Any comments?
Reply
View %s replies
View %s reply
Related posts
Show more related posts
We check all user comments within 48 hours to make sure they are from real people like you. We're glad you found this article useful - we would appreciate it if you let more people know about it.
Popup final window
Share this blog post with friends and co-workers right now:

We check all comments within 48 hours to make sure they're from real users like you. In the meantime, you can share your comment with others to let more people know what you think.

Once a month you will receive interesting, insightful tips, tricks, and advice to improve your website performance and reach your digital marketing goals!

So happy you liked it!

Share it with your friends!

1 1 1

Or review us on 1

3228112
50
5000
74306918