Drop off rates: meaning, benchmark, tools and tips to improve it

Drop off rates: meaning, benchmark, tools and tips to improve it.

You have a website for a reason, but even as hard as you try, users do not register on your site or when they do, most of them just abandon before submitting. Is there a problem on your website? Or are there other reasons… let’s understand what the drop-off rate means:

Drop rate helps you identify the steps in the funnel that are causing users to drop off. Conducting analysis on those steps will help you take necessary actions to minimize drop offs and optimize conversions.

To calculate the Drop off rate, you need to divide the number of people who abandon their purchase or inquiry by the total number of people who initiated it.

For example, if 2000 people visit your website but only 200 people submit the signup form, the drop off rate would be 90%.

Benchmark: What is a good or a bad drop off rate?

It is difficult to define what a good or a bad drop off rate is. it depends on many factors, for instance the complexity signup process will increase the drop off rate.

For the past few months, I have been participating in calls with clients that need to improve their signup flows due to customer churned. The main reasons they give me are:

1. The form is too long
2. The information requested may not be ready to be provided or can be sensitive
3. The difficulty to identify in which steps clients are dropping off to be able to correct them.

However, in order to analyze this rate properly, we need to investigate more metrics like Industry benchmarks. For example, when comparing these 2 industries, we can learn something very interesting:

As we can see in these graphics, the complexity of the forms in the Telecoms industry is much higher than in the Ecommerce industry. Nevertheless, the conversion rate is also high, which contrasts with the belief that a complex signup may affect the drop off rate. 

The explanation of the difference between these 2 industries is that for Ecommerce, users pay more visits to these sites just to check the products but registering is not a must. However, for the Telecoms industry, users already have a pain to cover, and in order to proceed with the service they must register on the site. 

This is why we cannot compare the signup forms between different industries. Depending on the service you offer, the signup needs to be adapted. You can get data from more industries on this website.  

How to measure and monitor drop off rates?

1. Google analytics

Perhaps, Google Analytics is the most widely used tool for the segment. It helps you learn more about your customers’ behavior and interaction with your product and website. 

Armed with this valuable data, you can make choices that would steer the users towards just the right page or button, improving conversion and retention statistics.

2. Amplitude

With Amplitude, you can analyze various user cohorts – groups of users based on patterns in behavior and usage. As a result, you can tailor the user onboarding experience to each group without spreading yourself thin to please each user.

3. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is great for understanding how users behave and interact with your website and, more importantly, your product. With better segmentation and more flexible funnels and retention reports, Mixpanel helps you understand how users convert or drop off at every step of their journey.

4. Zuko analytics

Zuko is an online form and checkout analytics and optimization tool to understand when, where and why visitors abandon your forms. It allows you to get data on each form field to identify where your UX issues are without the need for a developer.

Other key metrics in your funnel

Other important keys that we can take into consideration when measuring the drop off rate are the following:

• Form views: A Form View is the count of user views of a page containing a form. It is different from Form Submissions because the user does not have to submit the form for it to count as a view.
• View to start
• Start to completion: The time to complete the forms depends on the user time to submit the form since they start it. If the time to submit it is too long, we may find out that there is a problem or something needs to be corrected. 
• View to completion
• Average time in form: The time each user spends in your form is also giving a lot of information. If the average time is longer than expected, we may need to rethink the order of the form to make it easier to complete.

We cannot forget to quote the importance of the mobile Experience. How does the signup look on mobile devices? Are a significant number of your drop-offs from mobile users? Are they even getting to your flow, or do they look at your main page and bounce?

Mobile matters more and more with each passing month, and if you haven't taken the time to ensure that your site is usable on mobile devices, you're alienating users. However, in order to measure it, we need to go back to the metrics per industry to be able to get a clever image:

In these 5 industries, we can appreciate that the Conversion rate is better in desktops than mobiles, although for Insurance, mobiles represent an important part. This helps us to understand where we should dedicate more effort.  

Tips to improve your drop off rates

Now with the information gathered, I think it would be important to provide a couple of tips about best practices in signup forms.

Prioritize social login above all other options: promote the use of social providers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook, to provide your users with a One-click signup form instead of having them fill out fields like name, email or password. Also make sure these social providers are placed above all other options, this will make it easier to find them when scrolling down on mobile devices.

Don’t ask the user to fill out the same field twice: there are some security exceptions but as a general rule, avoid asking the user to repeat fields twice (eg. email or password) when creating an account. This increases the amount of time filling out the form and can be very annoying to the user.

If you are working with registration forms and would like to find ways to improve your drop off rates, do not hesitate to try our platform as our main expertise is signup forms. You can also find more tips in this link.

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