How to Find Out Where Users Abandon Your Forms (Field-by-Field Tracking)

To find out where users abandon your forms, you need field-level form analytics: a report that shows how many visitors reached each field, where they stopped, which field was the last one they touched before giving up, and recordings of the abandoned attempts. Page-level analytics can only tell you that a form converts poorly. Field-level data tells you it's the phone-number field — and recordings tell you why. This guide covers how form abandonment tracking works, how to read the data with a real example, the most common reasons people quit forms, and the fixes that lift completion rates.

Why form abandonment is so expensive

A visitor who starts a form has already decided they're interested. They found you, read the page, and began typing. Losing them at this point is losing your warmest traffic — the same people who are most likely to become leads or customers. On checkout forms the stakes are higher still: Baymard Institute's long-running research puts average online cart abandonment at around 70%, with unexpected costs, forced account creation and long, complicated checkout forms among the leading reasons people give.

The good news is that form problems are usually specific and fixable. A form rarely fails everywhere; it fails at one or two fields. Finding those fields is the whole game.

How form abandonment tracking works

A form analytics tool watches interactions with each field rather than just the final submit. As a visitor moves through the form, it records which fields they focus and fill. When they submit, that's a completion. When they leave without submitting, it's an abandonment — and the last field they interacted with is recorded as the point where they gave up. Values typed into sensitive fields are masked; what's measured is behavior (which field, in what order), not what people typed.

In Clicktics, this runs automatically from the same script that records sessions — there's nothing to tag field by field. Forms on your site appear in the Form Analytics report as visitors use them.

Reading the data: a real example

Here's 30 days of a demo store's checkout form in the Form Analytics report:

Read it top to bottom, the way a visitor fills it in:

• email → full_name → address → city → postcode: a gentle slope from 26 to 19 visitors. Some loss is normal on any form — interruptions, people comparing prices, second thoughts.
• phone: 17 reached, 58.8% quit. This is the cliff. More than half the visitors who got this far gave up at the phone field.
• card_number: 7 reached. Only the visitors who got past phone made it to payment.

The "last field before giving up" panel confirms it: phone was the last field for 10 of the 19 abandoned attempts — more than every other field combined. Without field-level data, this store would see a 27% completion rate and start guessing: shorten the form? Redesign the page? Change the button colour? With it, the problem has a name.

Find out why: watch the abandoned attempts

Numbers locate the problem; recordings explain it. The report links straight to replays of abandoned sessions, so you can watch what happened at the phone field. In cases like this, the cause is usually one of a few things:

• Validation rejects real numbers — international formats, spaces, a leading +, or a missing country code.
• The field is required with no explanation, and visitors don't want to be called.
• The error message is invisible — shown above the fold while the visitor is looking at the button, or not shown at all.
• On mobile, the wrong keyboard appears (a text keyboard instead of a number pad), making entry fiddly.

Watching five or six abandoned attempts is usually enough to tell which it is. If you see visitors typing, getting an error, retyping and leaving, it's validation. If you see them pause and leave without typing, it's reluctance — and the fix is explaining why you need the number, making it optional, or removing it.

The 8 most common reasons people abandon forms

Reason 6 connects to another signal worth watching: visitors who click Submit repeatedly because nothing seems to happen show up as rage clicks. Our guide to rage clicks and dead clicks covers how to spot them.

How to fix form abandonment, step by step

1. Fix the worst field first

Resist redesigning the whole form. Find the single field with the highest quit rate, fix it, and measure. In the example above, making the phone field optional (or fixing its validation) is likely to recover a meaningful share of the 10 visitors a month who gave up there.

2. Remove every field you don't need now

For each field, ask: will we use this answer before the first conversation or delivery? If not, remove it or ask later. A lead form that collects a name and email converts far better than one that also wants a phone number, job title and budget.

3. Make validation forgiving

Accept phone numbers with spaces and country codes, postcodes with or without spaces, and emails with uppercase letters. Strip formatting on your side instead of rejecting the visitor.

4. Show errors where people are looking

Validate as people leave each field, put the message directly under it in plain language ("Please include your area code"), and keep what they've already typed.

5. Tune for mobile

Use the right input types so phones show the right keyboard (number pad for phone, email keyboard for email), turn on autofill, and make inputs and buttons large enough to tap easily.

6. Reassure at the sensitive moments

Add a one-line explanation next to fields people hesitate on ("We'll only call about your order"), and place security and privacy cues near payment fields.

7. Measure the funnel around the form

A form is one step in a larger path. Track the steps before and after it so you can see whether a better form actually produces more completed purchases or qualified leads.

Our guide to sales funnel metrics explains which steps to track, and traffic but no conversions walks through a full diagnosis when the form isn't the only problem.

Do multi-step forms reduce abandonment?

Splitting a long form into steps often helps, for a few reasons: each screen feels short, a progress indicator shows the end is near, and starting with easy questions builds commitment before the harder ones. But steps add clicks, and a badly designed step can become a new drop-off point.

If you try a multi-step form:

• Start with the easiest, least sensitive questions. Ask for email or the type of service first; save phone and payment for later steps.
• Show progress ("Step 2 of 3") so visitors know how much is left.
• Save as they go where you can, so an interrupted visitor doesn't lose their answers.
• Track each step as a stage in your funnel and each field in form analytics, so you can see exactly which step and field lose people.

Treat it as an experiment: compare completion rates and results for a few weeks before deciding. For short forms, removing fields usually beats splitting them up.

Lead forms vs checkout forms: different problems

The warning for lead forms: removing fields usually raises completion, but check lead quality too. If your sales team truly needs a field to qualify a lead, keep it — and explain why you're asking. Data on lead quality alongside completion rate tells you whether a shorter form is producing more real opportunities or just more noise.

What is fixing one field worth?

A quick estimate helps you decide where to spend effort. Using the demo checkout above, scaled to a store with 400 checkout-form starts a month:

• About 260 visitors reach the phone field each month (17 of 26 in the demo, or 65%).
• 58.8% of them quit there — roughly 150 abandoned checkouts a month at one field.
• If a fix recovers even a third of those, that's about 50 more completed checkouts.
• At a $60 average order, that's roughly $3,000 a month from changing one field.

The exact figures will differ for your form, but the shape is common: one field causes a disproportionate share of abandonment, and fixing it beats any redesign.

What to measure after a change

• Completion rate (submitted ÷ started) — the headline number.
• Quit rate at the field you changed — should drop noticeably.
• "Last field before giving up" — the field you fixed should fall down this list, and the next problem will rise to the top.
• Downstream results — purchases or qualified leads, to make sure you didn't remove a field your sales process needs.

Give each change one to two weeks of normal traffic before judging it, and change one thing at a time so you know what worked.

Frequently asked questions

What is form abandonment?

Form abandonment is when a visitor starts filling in a form — interacts with at least one field — but leaves without submitting. It's measured as the share of form starts that don't become submissions.

How do I track form abandonment?

Use a form analytics tool that records field-level interactions: which fields were reached, where visitors stopped, and the last field before abandoning. Page-level analytics only shows whether the form was submitted, not where it failed.

What is a good form completion rate?

It depends heavily on the form. Short newsletter or contact forms often complete at high rates once started, while long checkout or application forms complete far less often. Compare each form with its own history and focus on the field with the biggest drop.

Does asking for a phone number reduce conversions?

Phone number fields are a well-known drop-off point, especially when they're required without explanation or validate strictly. Field-level data shows whether that's true for your form — if it is, make the field optional, explain why you need it, or remove it.

Can I see what users typed into abandoned forms?

Responsible tools mask sensitive fields so typed values are never captured. What you see is behavior — which fields were filled, in what order, and where the visitor stopped — which is what you need to find the problem.

Find the field that's costing you leads

Clicktics shows field-by-field drop-off for every form, the last field before visitors give up, and replays of abandoned attempts — alongside funnels, heatmaps and full session recordings, from one lightweight script. Find your worst field this week with a free 14-day trial.

Start your 14-day free trial → or learn about Form Analytics.