How to Use Google Docs for Super Fast (and Free) Landing Page Conversion Forms

Whether it's a news story that affects your product, or you just have a really tight timeline on a project, sometimes you just really need to get a campaign out in a rush. And as we all know, usually the best campaigns have some kind of conversion point on the landing page - somewhere you can collect information such as the visitors email address.

 

Waiting for your developers to create a form and set up the infrastructure (like a database table) to hold and report on the information can seem like an eternity while you're watching traffic go through the site without leaving a trace of conversion behind them.

 

But you need a form and a way to collect the data, so what can you do?

 

Simple Landing Pages

 

While not for enterprise organizations, smaller businesses may be able to take advantage of Google Docs to create ridiculously quick and easy conversion points in landing pages.

 

See the following example of a Google Docs form which can collect voluntary visitor data for viewing and downloading later. This form took about 5 minutes to set up and embed in this page.

 

Advantages of Google Docs Forms

• Anyone with a Google Account can create a form
• Very easy implementation - just create the form and check the resulting spreadsheet for results
• The form can be embedded in the page or emailed to recipients
• Visitors will not be taken off your website when they fill out the form
• Forms can be created and viewed collaboratively
• The results can be downloaded as a standard spreadsheet

 

Disadvantages of Google Docs Forms

• The information is saved on Google's servers, not your own
• You may need to adjust your privacy policy to allow for using Google Docs forms
• Formatting options for the form are somewhat inflexible

How to Set up a Google Docs Form in a Landing Page

 

To set up a form, sign into Google and visit Google Docs. When you are at the main page of Google Docs, click on New -> Form.

 

Once on the form creation page, create a title, an optional description, and create all the questions you want to include. To add additional questions, click on Add question at the top of the page. You can also choose a theme (colors and background) for your form by clicking on Theme: Plain.

 

Once your form has been created, click Save. The spreadsheet to hold the form will be automatically created for you.

 

To change the message that people will see after they fill out the form, click on More actions -> Edit confirmation.

 

To include the form in your landing page, click on More actions -> Embed from the form creation page. Some HTML code will appear which you can edit if required, and include in your page. Copy and paste this code into your landing page, and you're done!

 

When you want to check the results of your form, just open the spreadsheet created by the form (this should be the name of your form) and look at the data, or download it as a spreadsheet or PDF, or other formats.

Caveat

 

Remember - not all businesses may feel comfortable with having their visitor data saved on Google's servers. If this might be the case in your organization, make sure you clear this with the person in charge of your privacy policies before setting up your landing page.

 

 

Diver photo by cambodia4kidsorg