CiviContribute validation analytics

[JonGold]

In the course of debugging a problem a client of mine had, I created an extension to e-mail on hook_validate and hook_postProcess for their contribution pages.  What I found was that about 3 in 4 donations that completed had to be validated multiple times.

Also recently, I had a client ask me about tracking how many people came to a contribution page and didn't donate.

I was thinking about these two issues.  The second issue is much deeper than the first - but I thought it might be nice to write an extension that saved a record of what validation issues folks were having on public-facing pages, especially contribution pages.  Maybe save a record to civicrm_system_log?  Then pull them in a report by frequency - much like the Drupal "top pages not found" report, it would give helpful feedback about problems people had with your site.

I don't have time to write this right now, but I wanted to submit it for feedback so the idea could get fleshed out!

[Chris Burgess]

I definitely think this would be a service worth adding, I'd suggested something internally but it's on a long list of crazy ideas waiting for attention

There are some existing options - leveraging simple jQuery plugins to record data in Google Analytics (https://github.com/acoard/jquery-form-abandonment), paid services like Formisimo (http://www.formisimo.com/features). Haven't tried either, and the real value would be in recording and reporting which fields trigger validation failures frequently and the level of abandonment IMO.