Form Abandonment Tracking for Home Service Companies

Formstack’s industry data puts the average form abandonment rate at 68% across all industries. For home service companies, MightyForms reports that number climbs past 80% - largely because your forms ask homeowners for their phone number before they’ve decided to trust you.

That means for every 10 people who start your “Request a Quote” form, eight or more bail before hitting submit. You paid for the click, built the landing page, wrote the copy. And you never knew they were there.

If you’ve searched for Hotjar form analytics to diagnose the problem, you’ve hit a dead end most guides haven’t caught up to: Hotjar discontinued form tracking in December 2020. The feature pages are gone, the help docs redirect, and a lot of contractors are still paying for Hotjar expecting form data they’ll never get.

What form abandonment tracking actually measures

Know what you’re buying before you spend money on tools. Form analytics breaks into three categories.

Drop-off points show you the exact field where visitors quit, what percentage of starters never finished, and whether mobile users drop at different rates than desktop. For most contractors, the drop-off clusters around the phone number field.

Friction indicators reveal the struggle behind the numbers. Time-per-field tracking shows where visitors hesitate. Field re-entry rates - typing, deleting, retyping - signal frustration. Optional fields that nobody fills out tell you the field shouldn’t exist.

Recovery opportunities are where tracking turns into revenue. Some tools capture partial submissions, giving you an email address even when the visitor never hit submit.

Most contractors care about one thing: the phone number field. Research shows that adding a phone field drops conversions 30-48%, even when you mark it optional. Homeowners see “Phone Number” and assume you’re going to call them repeatedly.

The form analytics landscape after Hotjar

Hotjar pulled its form analytics to focus on heatmaps and session recordings. Several tools moved in to fill that gap.

Zuko (formerly Formisimo)

Cost: ~$130/month for 10,000 sessions

Zuko rebuilt what Hotjar killed. You get field-by-field analytics including time per field, drop-off rates, re-entry patterns, and blank field reports. Their alerting system notifies you when abandonment spikes.

Good for: Companies with enough traffic to justify $130/month and the discipline to act on the data.

The catch: You’re paying for analytics without getting the abandoned leads back. You’ll know exactly where they left, but you won’t know who they were.

Insiteful

Cost: Custom pricing, free trial available

Insiteful takes a different approach. Instead of showing you dashboards, it captures partial form submissions in real time. When someone enters their name and email but leaves before hitting submit, you get that contact information.

This matters for lead recovery. A visitor who typed their email into your form had intent. Insiteful lets you follow up with those people instead of watching them disappear into your bounce rate.

Good for: Companies that want to recover abandoned leads, not just study abandonment patterns.

MightyForms Abandoned Form Recovery

Cost: Included in paid plans

MightyForms captures partial form data as visitors type, even if they never hit submit. Their system can trigger automated email or SMS messages prompting visitors to come back and finish where they left off.

Their data on home service forms is what shows the 80%+ abandonment rate. The phone number field is the primary driver - homeowners start the form, see the phone field, and close the tab.

Good for: Contractors who want form building and abandonment recovery in one tool.

Google Analytics + Tag Manager (DIY)

Cost: Free

You can track form abandonment with custom events in GA4 and Google Tag Manager. Set up triggers for field focus, field completion, and form submission.

The catch: No field-level time tracking, no re-entry data, no partial lead capture. You’ll know 70% of visitors abandoned, but you won’t know if they hesitated for 45 seconds on the phone field or bounced in two seconds flat.

Crazy Egg

Cost: $99-$499/month

Crazy Egg bundles form analytics with heatmaps, recordings, and A/B testing. The form tracking isn’t as granular as Zuko’s, but you get a broader conversion optimization toolkit.

Good for: Companies that want form analytics as part of a bigger CRO suite.

What contractors usually discover

After running form tracking, most home service companies find the same patterns.

The phone field kills conversions. Homeowners searching “emergency plumber near me” at 11pm don’t want to wait for a callback. They want to call you on their terms. Asking for their phone number - when yours is already at the top of the page - creates friction that costs you leads.

Homeowners know what happens after they submit. On a ContractorTalk thread, one office manager described her company’s follow-up process: “makes the first call 2 days after emailing the estimate… then we have to call back a week later… then they want another 2 weeks.” She added: “I dont want to be a pest and I feel like a stalker calling every week lol and its a huge waste of time!”

Another contractor on the same thread put it bluntly: “if you bug me too much I’ll round file your proposal no matter how good it is.”

They abandon your form because they know what comes next - a barrage of calls they aren’t ready for.

Too many fields drive abandonment. Every field beyond name and contact method costs you submissions. Your “how did you hear about us” dropdown isn’t worth the leads it loses.

Mobile forms underperform desktop. If your form wasn’t designed for thumbs, you’re losing mobile traffic before they attempt the first field.

The follow-up dynamic that drives abandonment

Form analytics tools measure what happens on the page. They can’t measure the reason behind the abandonment - the homeowner’s past experience with contractor follow-up.

On another ContractorTalk thread, a contractor shared his approach: “I will attempt to return an inquiry 3 times… On the 3rd call, I will say ‘this is my 3rd time trying to return your call.’ Surprisingly, I usually finally get a return call.”

That dynamic runs both ways - contractors feel like they’re chasing, homeowners feel like they’re being chased. The form becomes a commitment gate, and homeowners who aren’t ready to commit simply leave.

This is why form abandonment rates in home services run so much higher than the 68% industry average. Your visitors aren’t confused by your form. They’re avoiding the sales process that starts the moment they hit submit.

The real question: tracking or identification?

Form analytics tells you why people abandon your form. That’s useful for fixing your conversion path.

But the bigger opportunity is identifying visitors who never intended to fill out a form at all. Homeowners who prefer calling never start your form. The ones who bookmark your page to discuss with a spouse never fill anything out.

Tracking form abandonment helps you optimize one conversion path. Visitor identification captures demand from every path - including the ones that skip your form entirely.

If your form converts at 3% and you optimize it to 5%, you’ve improved one channel. If you can identify the other 95% of visitors who never touched your form, you’ve opened up an entirely different category of lead capture.

What to do with the data

If you invest in form analytics, run a structured three-month test. Don’t just install the tool and check it when you remember.

Month 1: Baseline your current abandonment rate. Identify the worst-performing field by drop-off percentage. Don’t change anything yet - you need clean data to measure against.

Month 2: Remove or make optional the field with the highest drop-off. If it’s the phone field, try removing it entirely and adding “We’ll respond by email within 2 hours.” Measure the change.

Month 3: Test form length. Run a three-field version (name, email, service needed) against your current form. Track submission rates and lead quality - shorter forms sometimes attract lower-intent inquiries.

The pattern with home service forms is consistent: simpler converts better. Every question you don’t ask is one less reason to leave.

Most contractors who track form abandonment end up removing fields. The data almost always points the same direction: you’re asking for too much before you’ve earned the homeowner’s trust.

Should you pay for form tracking?

Pay for it if you have 10,000+ monthly visitors, your form gets enough submissions to produce statistically meaningful data, you have time to run monthly tests, and you’re committed to making changes - not just collecting dashboards.

Skip it if you’re under 5,000 monthly visitors (sample sizes too small), you already know your form is too long but haven’t simplified it yet, or you’d rather identify more visitors than diagnose the ones who leave.

Run the math. If Zuko costs you $130/month and the data helps you recover 5 extra leads per month, those leads need to be worth at least $26 each to break even. For most home service companies where average job value runs $200-$2,000+, five recovered leads more than pays for the tool.

But if you’re paying $130/month and checking the dashboard once a quarter, you’re buying reports nobody reads. The value of form tracking is entirely in the changes you make based on what it shows you.

Form tracking is a diagnostic tool. Whether it’s worth your money comes down to one question: will you actually fix what it finds?

Related reading

• Why Website Visitors Don’t Fill Out Your Forms - the data behind phone fields, form length, and homeowner behavior
• Capturing Lost Leads - strategies for recovering demand that slips through your website
• How to Get More Leads From Your Website - the full playbook for turning traffic into booked jobs