Free Feedback Form for Google Analytics

Feedback Forms on web sites are getting more and more popular - and for one good reason. Web Analytics including Voice of the Customer, or Why as Avinash Kaushik calls it, can be some of the most valuable data collection and analysis you can do.

But, combining What data with Why data is even better.

Because Why + What can give so much more insight, I have made a Non-intrusive Feedback Form that can be easy customized and sends data directly into Google Analytics using Event Tracking.

Feedback Form Customization and Functions:

• Ask for Feedback based on Page Level or Site Level
  • Only one feedback per visitor for either Site or Page Level
    
  • Page Level: The visitor can comment and rate different pages on your site, but not rate and comment the same page twice. After commenting the Feedback Form will be disabled for the particular page.
    
  • Site Level: The visitor can only comment and rate once. After commenting the Feedback Form will be disabled on all pages.
• Use colors that you prefer for text, background, borders and submit button.
  • Both color names and hexadecimal colors can be used (ex. black or #000000).
• Decide all important text on the Feedback Form like "Thank You" Messages, Error Messages, text on Submit Button etc.
• Width of the Feedback Form can be changed.
• Placement (left or right) can be changed
• Comments can be either Mandatory or Optional.
• Turn on/off tracking of error messages.
  
• Set how many days the comment form should be disabled after feedback has been submitted.
• Possibility to track feedback as conversions in Google Analytics.
• Visitors can hide/show Feedback Form with a click.
• Because feedback is submitted directly into Google Analytics it's easy to drill down into your data and
  
  • find out which URL the visitor was on when feedback was given
  • find out which traffic source the visitor came from or if the search phrase the user arrived from can be a reason for a negative feedback.
    
  • etc.

If you want even more customization for this Free Feedback Form, also check out my article about How to use BTBuckets to Administrate the Google Analytics Feedback Form afterwards.

Google Analytics Event Report

Data from the Feedback Form will be reported as Events in Google Analytics. The principle is shown below.

1. Event Category (Name)
   • Feedback.
2. Event Actions
   • Your Feedback Question Heading.
   • Error message "Feedback Radio Button not Selected" (optional).
     
   • Error message "Feedback Text not filled Out" (only when comment field is mandatory).
     
   • Feedback Opened (optional).
     
   • Feedback Closed (optional).
     
3. Event Label
   • Input Text in Comment Form
     • If Comment Field is disabled and Vertical Radio Button layout is selected, text that supports the Radio Buttons will be stored as Event Labels instead.
       
4. Event Value
   • Value from Radio Button. The first Radio Button (left or top) will always have value 1.

If the Comment Field is activated, it's best to use a graded Radio Button scale (ex. Bad -> Good), with the best option as the last option.

The reason for storing Error Messages as Event Actions and not Labels, are simply because storing Error Messages as Labels would mess with your reported average Event Values.

The screenshot below shows an example where I have drilled down to find out which page the user was on when the question "How useful was this page?" was answered.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Some users were happy, others not. Without my Feedback Form I wouldn't know that, and I wouldn't know Why.

How to install and use the Feedback Form

There are 2 methods for installing the Feedback Form

1. Download the feedback form solution (ZIP-file), unzip the files and upload them to a folder on your website called feedback (ex. yourdomain.com/feedback)
2. Load the Feedback Form from my website

Option 1 should be your preferred solution. The reason for this is because if my server is slow, loading the Feedback Form from my website would also slow down your site.

Loading the Feedback Form from my website

Copy the code below, and paste it right before your closing </body> tag. Then adapt the settings in the code to your needs like changing question, options, colors etc.

Loading the Feedback Form from your own website

Copy the code below, and paste it right before your closing </body> tag.

Then change line 36 from
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.savio.no/feedback/ga-feedback-v1.js"></script>
to
<script type="text/javascript" src="/feedback/ga-feedback-v1.js"></script>

Then adapt the settings in the code to your needs like changing question, options, colors etc.

The red text is what you can change to get different settings. Happy collecting qualitative feedback directly into Google Analytics.

Remove formatting from Code

As I mentioned earlier, if you want even more customization and easier handling of the Feedback Form, check out my article about How to use BTBuckets to Administrate the Google Analytics Feedback Form.

By using BTBuckets as an administration tool you:

• Don't have to implement all the code above in your website
• Don't have to upload new code to your website if you change ex. your question, color etc. You control everything from within BTBuckets
  
• Can ask different questions to different audiences
  • Only ask your returning visitors, or ask new and returning visitors different questions
• Can turn the Feedback Form on and off without changing anything in your code
• Only show the Feedback Form on selected pages
• etc.

Just Remember

Even if this Feedback Form allows you to collect many types of feedback (it's up to you to ask the great questions), just remember this:

• You are not allowed to track and store personal information in Google Analytics, so do not ask for the users e-mail, phone number etc. in the comment field.
• A passive Feedback Form like this one tends to attract either very positive or negative feedback. You will probably not often get feedback from visitors that don't have a strong opinion.

Some closing comments about the Feedback Form

This Feedback Form is what I would call a Beta version and I'm not a programmer. I have tested the Feedback Form in many different browsers, but not all. I think the Feedback Form will break in Internet Explorer 6, but since my opinion is that IE6 should die I do not plan to fix that.

If I find some time I will try improve it even more depending on the popularity to the Feedback Form. For example, making it possible to load the Feedback Form Asynchronous for those who prefer to run the Feedback Form from my website is one thing I've been thinking of. For the moment the Feedback Form can't be loaded Asynchronous.

Any updates I do will be mentioned as comments to this blog post, so if you want to be updated about this I recommend you to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog post.

The Feedback Form only works with the new Google Analytics Asynchronous Code.

If you find any errors, or think that something could be improved, please let me know.

Related articles:

• How to use BTBuckets to Administrate the Google Analytics Feedback Form
• Excel Feedback Form Reporting using Google Analytics API

Some final words about this site and how to comment

If you look around on my site you have probably noticed that everything else is written in Norwegian. Since this blog normally is in Norwegian, and I haven't had time to implement a multilingual blog system, you find some explanations of how to comment below:

Click "Legg til kommentar" below. Than fill out your name (Navn) (Mandatory), e-mail (Epost) (Mandatory) and your website (Ditt nettsted) if you have a website. HTML formatting doesn't work in my comment field, use BBCode formatting instead. You can drag the comment field around if you want to. If you want to preview what you have written, click on "Forhåndsvis". When you are done and want to save your comment, click on "Lagre".

If you haven't had any comments approved on this blog before, I will have to approve your comment manually.

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Clik here to view.