Building hit to hit sequence segment

[floriana_guardi]

I'm investigating a form issue where hitting the submit button triggers a form submission event even if the form is not submitted and we have a form error event fired right after. So in the debugger we see form submission event -> form error event in subsequent hits.

I'm trying to isolate these instances by building a visit level segment, but I'm not sure if this working properly. Which option would fit best my requirement?

All visit level, options:

1. [Form success event exists] Then [Form error event exists]
2. [Form success event exists] Then within 1 Hit [Form error event exists]
3. [Form success event exists] Then within 1 Pageview [Form error event exists]

I created a report using Form success event as the metric and compared these three segments.

Questions:

• Is the "Then" operator on his own referring to subsequent hits or does it include scenarios where the second hit in the sequence happens at any point after the first one? So within the visit if visit level and for a  visitor at visitor level
• I would assume segment 2 is what I should be using, but when I review the data segment 3 is closer to identifying instances where we could validate the discrepancy by comparing form events and actual submissions in our CRM - what creates this difference? Which one should I use?

Thank you for your help!

[bjoern__koth · Accepted solution]

Hi @floriana_guardi 

great work with your segments!

I would say 2. should do the trick, assuming that both form events are firing in a direct sequence without any intermediate other tracking calls.

Concerning your questions

• the Then operator in a Visit-scoped segment does not care about how many hits have happened in between before the second relevant hit happens. In that terms, your "Within 1 Hit" is important, else you may include hits on other forms that may happen at any moment later during the visit. More of an edge case, but possible
• correct, 2 should be it. Hard to say why your CRM shows discrepancies. Do you have a rough discrepancy percentage?

Taking one step back and looking at your setup. Am I right assuming that you are having a Tag Management rule that is triggered by form submits and not by the underlying page, only when the form submit was successful and no validation errors exist (event-driven)?

This is unfortunately a common issue with forms, leading to false positives. A form validation can happen on the client-side/browser but also on the server-side.
And each validation errors may have their own way of styling error messages. At least there is (currently, to my knowledge) no "one" way of handling things easily or, even better, not triggering a form submit even though the form shows validation errors.

So, to cut things short, to address the issue on tag management side, you may add one or more conditions in your form submit rule that make sure there are no visible validation errors.

At least this is likely where I would start.

[floriana_guardi]

Thank you for the feedback!

The CRM discrepancy for one specific form was as high as almost 6x more form submissions in AA compared to actual entries in the CRM. Other forms that are flagged using the "within 1 hit" segment do not show such a high discrepancy. The "within 1 pageview" segment seems to more closely identify the problem forms.

The issue has been flagged to the developers in our company, so I leave the causal investigation to them. I'm working one estimating the impact in terms of forms affected and timing, but I will forward them your comment on the tag management rule so they can use it if helpful.

[MandyGeorge]

I agree with @bjoern__koth that 2 should work for you. But if you're seeing issues - is it possible that there are other calls firing in between your two events? When I build segments like this, I usually use the pageview (your 3rd segment), just in case there are any other calls firing in between the two that I want. If someone is browsing in multiple windows/tabs, those calls all go into the same path, so depending on the time lag between the events firing, it's possible there could be other events in between. Also, if there are other calls that could happen sometimes (such as modals that only fire sometimes), that might have an impact too.

[floriana_guardi]

Thank you for the feedback!

Yes, looking at the data and the responses I got here, I'm also inclined to think within 1 pageview may be a segment to look at as well!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Like the others have said, the "within 1 hit" should be the best option to restrict to the immediate action...

As for the difference between "Hit" (segment 2) and "Pageview" (segment 3) is that hits look at page views and actions, whereas pageviews just looks at the page views... it's possible there are other hits happening in the sequence that could be causing some issues with the "within 1 hit"... this might be why the within 1 page view looks slightly better?

However, is there a possibility that the error fires first, and then the success is triggered in your scenario? If the timing is very close, you might get "success then error" and "error then success" in different scenarios.

[floriana_guardi]

Thank you for the feedback!

Yes, I considered it might be possible that the error event fires first, unfortunately this would be indistinguishable from regular behavior: visitor hits submit, form error is flagged, visitor corrects the error and submits correctly. We do not have events for interaction with individual form fields, so no event would fire between error and success here, and it would all happen within one pageview.