I have a new rule. Not a new idea, just new to me as a "rule".

Don't ask me for things on the signup form unless you're going to do something with that information. Don't make me fill out fields just because it's what a sign-up form is "supposed" to look like.

Today's target is "How did you hear about us?". Seems fair, but it's 99% useless.

If the user is going to enter anything useful to you - that is, something actionable or meaningful to your marketing efforts - then it's already in your server logs. If it's not in your server logs, then the answer is something like "newspaper", "from a friend", "radio". Reasonable, but are you REALLY going to do anything with that information?

Are you going to get together in a management meeting this month and say "3 percent of our users clicked "radio", we should spend 3% of our budget on radio. Good lawd I hope not. For two reasons;

1. Spend your money on marketing that's getting more than 3%! In fact, spend all of your budget plus more on whatever is getting you 80% of your traffic and just eliminate the rest. Brand Awareness is not a thing anymore. It's just not.
2. If you're spending your money on anything that doesn't show up in your server logs, it's barely actionable. What radio ad? What time of day? What station? A response of "Radio" does nothing for you. And if it's barely actionable, you can't improve it. You can keep spending 3% on Radio if you want, I don't care, but your competition is going to cut radio and spend that 3% on something they can continuously improve and tune (like social media or targeted online ads).

Back to my point. If it's not trackable, you shouldn't be doing it. If it is trackable, your server logs already have the information, so don't put it on your signup form. You are the fancy website, I'm just a user with a short attention span. You figure it out.

There's one caveat to this, and that is tracking lead source by phone number. Using different numbers for different sources. There's several companies who offer these services, plus analytics and more. That's actionable and trackable. But, that doesn't involve your website, so get rid of the field anyway.

Back to my other, other point. Get rid of everything on your sign-up form that isn't useful to you as a business. Then, get rid of everything on your signup form that you could gather in the background without input from the user. Then get rid of anything that's somewhat useful to you, but takes more than 3 seconds for the user to enter. Then make damn sure if you're making users enter information like how they heard about you, you're using it for something. Don't waste my time.

If I actually tell you what friend told me about your site, are you going to give them a cookie? If not, what do you care? Google Analytics tells you 12% of your traffic is direct traffic, so we can deduce that "from a friend", "radio", "newspaper" and "other" make up 12% of your traffic. Meeting adjourned.

I went to your website with the intention to sign-up. Don't change my mind by making me fill out things you don't need, or worse still, things you do need, but won't ever actually do anything with.

Justyn

My Childhood friend Greg left Boeing to do good and help with African farming mechanization. You're a good man!