How did you hear about me?
Anna Talerico on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 02:03PM “How did you hear about us?”
Please, please, please don’t ask this question on a form. Banish it forever.
When you ask a visitor to convert, remember that you aren’t doing them a favor. They are giving you the favor of their time and attention. Asking ‘how did you hear about us?’ puts a burden on the user to answer something that has nothing to do with their relationship with your organization or their desire to sign up with you. It’s a self serving question, and self serving questions don’t belong in your conversion process.
Plus, what are the odds that respondents even answer accurately? Many years ago we had a client who was having the debate about whether or not to include the ‘how did you hear about us?’ question on their form. To solve it once and for all, they included a wacky choice in the drop down— “billboard,” and although the client never ran a billboard ad, this ended up being the most selected choice. Question removed from form forever.
Every field on a form is a barrier between you and the conversion—so get rid of questions that are self serving and make your conversion process all about them!
(here’s the awesome landing page that led me to this post — great landing page, but it would be even better if they got rid of “How did you hear about us?”)
Landing Pages, conversions, optimization in lead generation 
Reader Comments (7)
What is the alternative to asking in the form if you would like to get the information?
Joe,
I am not sure there is a reliable way to ask the customer this question, short of asking them directly while engaging in a phone or in-person conversation. With tracking, we can tell what the user clicked on to arrive at our site (ppc, organic, banner, direct, email, etc), which fills in part of the picture, but of course doesn't reveal how the customer originally first became aware of you. I am just not convinced that this is data we can expect to reliably get via a form. Another time to ask this question may be during a customer or visitor survey, but of course, that only canvases a small section of your audience. Of course, we need to work behind the scenes to determine which pieces of the marketing mix drive traffic and conversions to our pages. But why impose a question on the user that is so self serving?
Here's two ideas for figuring out how users find you using the phone, without asking on an initial web form.
1. If you ask for the user's phone number in the web form, using a hidden Click-to-Call you can automate a phone call to the user that thanks them for registering and asks them a couple of questions, including how they found you, after they submit the form.
2. If customers call your company to sign-up, rather than fill out a form online, you can use unique Call Tracking Numbers for each unique online and offline referral source. For example, use one unique tracking number on your direct mail, another for your PPC campaigns, another for SEO traffic, etc. Then look at your reports to figure out how users find you.
I agree and disagree with the points in this post somewhat. Coming from a background in the survey industry, I agree whole-heartedly that you cannot rely on the visitor to provide the correct information in a form field.
Instead of completely dropping fields of information, though, think first about what you can AUTOMATE! Don't give up valuable information because the form may be too long -- but instead figure out what you can stop asking the visitor first.
Where did they come from? You likely know that. If it's another website, you know the referring URL. If they came directly, you can use specific URLs for specific landing pages, or different landing pages for different campaigns, for instance, a different landing page for email campaigns vs. direct mail response.
Then use hidden form fields to prepopulate that information behind the scenes -- saving the visitor time and likely improving your conversion rates by having a shorter form, but also still capturing valuable information that is in the palm of your hand. :)l
Well, Janet, you know I agree with you wholeheartedly. You should know where someone came from, and that's why you shouldn't ask the user. I think we can all do much more with the behind the scenes data (where they came from, what region they are in, how many previous visits they have had, .... even browser type, etc).
So, just to reframe: because we value our customers, we shouldn't ask them questions that might harsh that getting-to-know-you vibe. Instead, we should use secret back-room scripts and scrape through databases in order to obtain that same information, because being secretly investigated by us will make a customer feel better about our relationship than if we asked them a question they already know will help us improve our business. Got it.
I don't think we are talking about secretly investigating customers. We are talking about making conversion easier for customers. If a prospect clicks a PPC ad and comes to a form, you know they came from PPC, you don't need to ask them. But, it's all in the name of higher conversions, so you can test with and without the question and just see which performs better. There is no right or wrong, there is just what works.