CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptgoogle-analytics
chacko
chacko

Reputation: 5184

Use Google Analytics custom events for feedback form

I was thinking of having a simple feedback form in my website. It would be something like: 

Your Feedback will help us improve.
[                                ]

and then a textfield/textarea where the user can type (let's say) up to 100 characters of feedback.

Rather than handling it all myself on the server-side I was thinking to use Google Analytics (since my site is already wireup) and every time a user writes a comment, send a custom event to google analytics.

I think it might work.

Can people suggest a better approach or point out any problem with this idea?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1789

Answers (2)

Yahel
Yahel

Reputation: 37305

There are a few problems with this.

First of all, it's against the Google Analytics Terms of Service to pass personally identifiable information to Google Analytics (#7). So, if you were to want to collect their feedback, you legally could not collect their name or email address without risking your account getting shutdown by Google.

Second, this is not at all what Google Analytics is for; its for collecting aggregate traffic and site interaction data. There's no easy-to-use interface for viewing long-form text information; I'm not even sure how you'd view event information thats longer than a few words.

Finally, Google Analytics sends its information in URLs, and there are size limitations to URLs (in Internet Explorer), and so Google Analytics will be default truncate any request with more than 2048 characters, meaning that your data will not collect accurately for longer feedback forms. (EDIT: Google Analytics recently raised this cap to 8096, by configuring the requests to use POST when >2048 characters.)

There are lots of free and easy to use data and form collection tools. Google Docs, for example, connected with Google Forms, can collect this data for you with ease. Then there's Wufoo, SurveyMonkey, UserVoice...I could go on forever.

Don't use Google Analytics for this. It's a bad idea with no upside.

Upvotes: 7

Rui Jiang
Rui Jiang

Reputation: 1672

Google Analytics events weren't made for gathering user feedback. Aside from the impracticalities of using the analytics console to view feedback, GA uses JSON to pass event information (which has size restrictions).

Why not try out uservoice.com or suggestionbox.com?

Upvotes: 0

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