Google Analytics: Tracking abandonment and goals for lightbox form

Question

I have a series of forms which represent my site's Goals in Google Analytics. Each one redirects to the same page with a query string to differentiate between them (eg /thank-you/?form-name ).

For reasons outside of my control, these forms have to be popups lightboxes and while tracking goal completion is as simple as adding a Goal URI for each "thank you" page, I don't know how to track abandonment. Abandonment in this case would be a user clicking "Cancel" instead of "Submit" in the popup.

Does anyone know how I can setup goal abandonment tracking using clicks on the Cancel button? I read about _gaq.push for sending custom Events to track, but I couldn't find how to link that to a Goal and track it as an abandonment.

Is this possible? If so, how would I set it up? Can it be linked to a specific goal so I can track the abandonment of each form separately?

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As an aside, for the situation above would it be better to have separate goals for each form or one goal for all forms differentiated by the goal URI query string?

Answer 1

In cases where you cannot add the GA code to the form (lightbox, or 3rd party), I would suggest you to create a virtual page view that will simulate a page visit on that form.

Use the following in your JS code that calls the form:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/your-directory/form']);

If you use Universal Analytics, then:

ga('send', 'pageview', '/your-directory/form');

Now the form will be rendered as a pageview, which will appears on your reports and Goals' funnel visualization. Remember to set it as a step in the goal settings: