The most important factor to considering when putting an online form together is to balance your own desires for information against whether requesting this information will stop the visitor from submitting the form.  Marketers/sales people want more information as it provides them with more details about visitors and analysts want more information as it allows them to segment data in more ways.  However, and I am sure there must be a study on this somewhere, there is an inverse relationship between the number of fields on a form and the likelihood of a visitor to complete the form.

This can be approached from two angles.  The first is to consider whether you really really need the information or not.  Is it something which it might be nice to know one day or can you immediately use it to impact your business.  The other angle is to consider just how off-putting requesting that piece of information will be to the visitor.  Will the visitor consider it reasonable to provide you with that piece of information given the nature of the form?

Keep in mind at all times how lengthy the form is and how long it will take to be filled in.  People are time poor and everyone is going to weigh up whether it is worth their valuable time to fill in a form given what they are likely to receive in return.

In terms of web analytics, it should be key to measure the conversion rate of visitors who complete the form compared to the number of visitors to the page containing the form.  Taking this a step further, if you can track form abandonment i.e. which field was in focus when a form was abandoned, this will provide valuable insights into the reason visitors are not completing forms.  Ideally all new forms or changes to forms should be tested using A/B or multivariate testing to ensure that the design used is the best option for your business.

My recommendation is to put as few barriers in the way of the visitor completing a form as possible.  Request all the information that you need and can use but if the information is just a nice to have that may come in useful one day, take it off the form.  If your business objective is to maximise the number of people who submit a form containing useful information, asking for the least information possible is a good step towards getting there.

His first recommendation is to innovate your way through the downturn in the economy by being creative (not gimmicky) and focusing on increasing the value to the customer.  The second recommendation is to become more efficient with your marketing spend, ensuring every dollar is optimised for results.

While I am biased, I believe this makes the role of the web analyst even more important.  If you are to know if the changes you are making are working for your business, you need to be able to understand and interpret the data.  It is great to have people who can create efficient and/or innovative marketing campaigns but it is just as important to have people who can accurately tell you what worked best, which marketing campaign delivered the best ROI and had the highest conversion rates and/or satisfaction levels.  With this knowledge, a business has a chance of not just surviving but of growing during this financial crisis.

I first read this article by Gary Stein on How Can I Best Use This (Ad) Space? It is about the rise of rich media ads and how JupiterResearch has predicted that by in 2009, the spend on rich media ads will be greater than for static media ads.  The downside is that he still expects there to be more ads on the internet in the future (makes sense with more websites trying to make money from selling ad space) but the hope is that we will start to see more relevant and engaging ads.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of the banner ad.  However I have been forced to recognise that an ad that is relevant to the website and to the people who are viewing that page is a worthwhile use of marketing budget (thanks Xenia).  Extending this through creating relevant ads which directly offer value to the viewer (Gary suggests games, currency converter, list of interesting blog posts, etc) is a definite positive, for internet users, website owners and for the people paying for the advertising.

However I still have issues with the marketers who have landed in the digital online world but whose heart is still with TV and believe that TV commercials are the best advertising medium for all situations (ROI/accountability are restrictions on their creativity). Which brings me to the second article Microsoft Makes Case for Display, Pushes Engagement Mapping by Zachary Rodgers.  This article is about how Microsoft is tackling one of the big challenges in web analytics, that of attributing credit/revenue across the different marketing sources that contributed to the sale or conversion.

This issue is just going to become bigger in the future and the current common methods of either last touch or first touch are not going to be accurate enough.  Microsoft has a new tool it is testing, Engagement Mapping, that allocates weighting to different ad elements based on a variety of factors.  This all sounds good to this point but I then read that marketers will have the ability to give a higher weighting to ad elements they deem more powerful, basically overriding to a degree what the data is saying.

Unless I have got this wrong, this basically means that marketers get to choose which channels they think are more important and the data will then show that those channels actually are more important.  From the data collected so far, somewhat unsurprisingly, it appears marketers believe the channels where they get to be more creative are more important.  This sounds contrary to the idea behind web analytics, which is meant to result in decisions being made based on data, not opinions.  And it makes the hope of a future with more engaging relevant online ads less likely, as marketers will instead be able to safely focus on making ads they like, not those that will appeal to the viewer, because that is what the data will say is driving the conversions and sales.

My hope for the future is that we will develop a system for fairly and accurately attributing sales and conversions to the different marketing elements.  While I can see why allowing people to tweak this based on their own opinions may aid in this process, it can never work in practice as everyone is biased.  I hope that online display advertising gets smarter, that it is not simply a print ad or a tv commercial moved onto the internet but that the advertising is designed for the internet and takes full advantage of the features of the internet.  And that these ads appear where and when the viewer might be interested in them.  I think if that is the case, everyone wins.