Form abandonment
A form abandon is a visitor who engaged a form field, started filling it out, and then left without ever submitting. They were close. Something stopped them. Clickport catches that moment so you can see which forms people give up on, instead of only seeing the ones that succeed.
What a form abandon is
A submission tells you who finished. An abandon tells you who tried and walked away. Clickport flags a form abandon when a visitor interacts with a field inside a form, then leaves the page or the site without that form ever being submitted. It is the gap between intent and completion, made visible.
How it is captured
Everything runs in the visitor's browser, in the tracker, and only a thin signal is sent. Clickport records that a form was engaged and never completed, identified by the form's selector. It never touches what was typed.
- Form selector only. A form is stored as its selector, like
form.signupor#contact-form. That is enough to tell forms apart without knowing anything about the person. - No field values, ever. The text people type, the email they entered, the card number, none of it is read or stored. Only the interaction-and-exit signal is recorded.
- No keystrokes. Clickport does not capture keypresses or build any picture of what was being typed.
- Cookieless. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no cross-session identity.
- Noise excluded. Page-wrapper forms and search boxes do not count as abandons, so a visitor who clicks a search field and leaves does not show up as a lost lead.
How to read it
In the Signals breakdown, Form abandons is one ranked row showing the visitors who started a form and left, and the total abandon events. Expand the row to see the individual form selectors, ranked, so the form that loses the most people sits at the top.
Click the row, or any sub-item, to cross-filter the whole dashboard to the visits where that form was abandoned. From there you can see which pages, devices, and sources lose the most people.
How to act on it
- Shorten long or confusing forms. A high abandon count on a form is a signal it asks for too much, or asks in a confusing order. Trim fields and re-test.
- Find the stalling required field. When the same form abandons over and over, a single required field is often the wall: a phone format people fight, an address line that rejects valid input, a tax id nobody has handy.
- Cut validation friction. Aggressive or unclear validation makes people give up. If abandons climb on a form you recently changed, the new rule is a prime suspect.
Relationship to funnels and goals
A goal records the people who completed a form. A form abandon records the people who tried and did not. Together they close the loop: the goal counts the wins, the abandon counts the misses on the very same form. When a funnel shows a sharp drop at a form step, the form abandon signal tells you the drop is friction inside the form, not visitors losing interest. Use the abandon to explain the gap your funnel reveals.
What is stored
Form abandon signals are deliberately thin. For each one Clickport keeps the form's selector and the page it happened on. What is never stored: field values, the text people typed, keystrokes, screen recordings, and any personal data. There is nothing here that identifies a person, and nothing that reveals what was being entered.
Good to know
- Forward-only. Form abandons exist for visits after the feature is active on your site. Past sessions cannot be backfilled.
- Single-page apps are covered. An abandon is tied to the right route even after a client-side navigation.
- Search and wrapper forms are excluded. Only real, fillable forms count, so the signal stays focused on the forms that matter.
- It does not use your pageview allowance. Form abandons are events, like outbound clicks and form submissions, and do not count toward your monthly pageview limit.