Data dictionary: VA.gov Forms KPIs

Successful submissions

Unique form submission events. Calculated by counting each session where an event with a “submission-successful” occurred.

An increase means more people are completing your form! A decrease could be fewer people starting the form or that fewer users are completing the process of submitting it.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in successful submissions. Successful form submissions are currently trending lower than historical data.

Weekly on Sunday

Forms by status

Form total for each category, calculated by looking at the event labels for each distinct session and form name combination.

Successful: form session (session + form name) has a “successful-submission” event label, even if a failure occurred before.

Failed: form session has a “submission-failed” event label and was not later successfully submitted.

Not submitted: form session has a “start-form” event label or “introduction” in previous page path AND has no subsequent failure or successful submission events.

Are the number of successfully submitted forms changing over time? How about failed forms? Drill down to view each category by month or go to the “Form completion” section to learn more.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in overall counts for Forms by status. Directional trend is identical to historical data.

Weekly on Sunday

Unique users

Unique users identified as new vs. returning.

Learn whether new or returning users are driving your overall traffic.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Forms started

Unique events where user started a form. Calculated by counting each session with a “start-form” event label or the form’s “introduction” page was viewed.

Helps contextualize forms submitted and the form completion rate.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in overall session counts resulting in a decrease in forms started overall counts. Form starts are trending lower than historical data.

Weekly on Sunday

Forms submitted

Unique form submission events. Calculated by counting each session where an event with a “submission-successful” occurred.

If the total number of forms submitted and the completion rate are both increasing, your form is performing well.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in forms submitted. Forms submitted is trending lower than historical data.

Weekly on Sunday

Form completion rate

Total users who submitted each form ÷ total users who started each form.

Of the forms that were started, what percentage were successfully submitted? In an ideal world, this would be as close to 1 as possible!

No difference

Weekly on Sunday

Completion rate by step

Step: Number of step and page title.

Users: Unique users who viewed each step.

Completed step: Percent of users from the first page who made it to each step.

Both table and funnel chart show the same information in two different ways. They should help you identify at what points in your form users are abandoning the process, or where most of them successfully continue to the next step.

No difference

Weekly on Sunday

Completion funnel

Visualizes the “completed step” column in table above (i.e. percent of users from the first page who made it to each step).

See above.

No difference

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. minutes to complete

Coming soon.

N/A

Cumulative time spent on each step

Coming soon.

N/A

Exit rate by step

Step: Step number and page title.

Viewed this step: Total users who visited the page.

Exit rate: Total users who exited ÷ total users who viewed.

See if there are certain steps where users are exiting the funnel at unusually high rates. Is that page particularly long or confusing?

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. sessions to complete

Total sessions where user viewed form ÷ total users, filtered for users who completed the form.

Similar to above, this helps us estimate how much time/effort the form takes users to complete.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in average sessions to complete. Average Sessions to complete is currently trending lower than historical data.

Weekly on Sunday

Sessions to complete distribution

Distribution of sessions where user viewed form for users who later successfully completed the form.

If the form is getting easier, we’d expect to see the distribution of sessions shift to the left (more 1 session users, fewer 3+ session users).

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. With this change, there is an expectation to see a decrease in sessions to complete distribution. Directional trend is identical to historical data. 

Weekly on Sunday

Completed in 1 session

Counts how many sessions it took for each user to complete the form, and then filters only users who completed the form in 1 session.

This KPI could be impacted by both how long it takes the user to complete the form or by any overall increases/decreases in form completion.

New sessions are not started when a user enters with new campaign parameters or if their session extends past midnight. The impact here has not yet been determined.

Weekly on Sunday

Top pages viewed before accessing the form

Page: URL of the page viewed before a form step. Excludes other steps in form process and form landing pages.

Unique users: Unique users who viewed each page before engaging with the form.

Where are your users coming from directly before visiting your form? Does it match your expectations?

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Devices used to access the form

Total users who visited the first step of the form, broken out by type of device used.

How are people accessing your content pages? This information can be used to identify potential device-specific bugs or prioritize future improvements.

No change

Weekly on Saturday

Top browser types used to access the form

Total users who visited the first step of the form, broken out by type of browser used.

See above.

In UA is defined as total users who visited the first step of the form, broken out by type of browser used. In GA4, it is defined as total unique users who visited the first step of the form, broken out by type of browser used. This will result in lower user counts across all categories.

Weekly on Sunday

Unique visitors

Unique users who visited the landing page.

Knowing how many people make it to your landing page helps put other KPIs about user behavior in context.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. visits per user

Total visits to the landing page ÷ unique users.

The closer to 1 this number is, the fewer repeat visitors your landing page has. This could mean that people are making it through the form in fewer sessions – or that fewer people are deciding to start the form at all.

Compare this with “Left without visiting form” KPI and the other metrics in the form completion and form timing & exits sections to clarify what trends may be driving these changes.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. minutes on page

Total minutes on page ÷ total sessions.

More time on page could mean that the information is useful and engaging – or it could mean that it’s dense and difficult to understand. Likewise, less time on page could mean users are getting to the form quickly or that they’re leaving the site.

Compare this KPI to trends in scroll depth and percent of users who leave without visiting the form to interpret this data.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. scroll depth

Scroll events capture when a visitor has made it through 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of the landing page. Calculated by averaging the maximum scroll depth per session on landing page.

Not configured for all landing pages.

The higher the percentage, the further down the page readers are scrolling.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Left without visiting form

Combined total of visits that were exits or bounces ÷ total sessions.

The higher this percentage is, the fewer users made it to the form or continued to look for what they needed on the VA website.

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Top sources

Top 5 sources of traffic, sorted by unique users.

Are your referral sources similar over time, or do they change month to month?

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Top campaigns

Top 5 referral campaigns, sorted by unique users.

How much traffic are campaigns driving to the landing page?

No change

Weekly on Sunday

Avg. star rating

User ratings on their form experience, scored on a 1-5 scale.

Card cannot be filtered by device and browser.

More stars = happier users! But averages can hide changes at the margins. They can also be impacted by weeks with small numbers of surveys submitted. When clicking through to the detailed view of averages by week, check the hover text to view the total number of surveys received.

Ratings distribution

Number of survey responses per rating and percent of total responses.

Card cannot be filtered by device and browser.

A 3-star average could describe many different ratings distributions. Are most of your surveys clustered towards the middle? Or are most reviews mostly positive, but a segment of users are having very negative experiences? Looking at your distribution of survey results – especially over time – can help surface patterns that an average alone may hide.