Results and Reporting Guide

Introduction

Paperform offer a variety of features to help you analyse and report on form results. These include providing a dashboard for your submissions and detailed analytical and reporting utilities, to name a few.

In this guide, we'll cover:

How submissions work.
Where to analyze your results.
The different types of submissions Paperform offer.
Products & Product Management.
Analytics.
Reporting.
Exporting your results.

How submissions work

Paperform captures two types of submission on your forms:

Partial Submissions
Submissions

When a respondent begins to answer questions on your form, Paperform recognises this and starts to record their responses. These records are referred to as Partial Submissions.

When a user clicks on the Submit button at the end of your form, this record becomes a regular Submission.

Partial Submissions require at least 5 seconds of inactivity after answering a question on your form.

Where to analyze your results

Paperform provides a handy dashboard to view and analyze your form results. This can be found by following our guide here. The different sections are broken down into:

Submissions
Partial Submissions
Products
Reports
Analytics

Submissions

Introduction to submissions

A Submission is your typical copy of your form's responses, showing a record of what was entered by an individual respondent.

Inside a submission, you'll typically find:

A copy of the fields a respondent completed.
Records of scoring or payments processed. (Optional)
A default PDF summary of the submission.
Copies of any custom PDFs generated upon submission. (Optional)
The submission ID.
The date & time the submission was sent.
Other metadata for the respondent if available (e.g. IP Address).

When each submission is received on Paperform, we provide tools for you set up post-submission actions. These include:

Sending a Custom Email to an address of your choice.
Sending a Default Submission Summary to the Paperform account holder (your email).
Generate a Custom PDF in a format of your choice.
Trigger an Integration action via a direct integration, zapier, or integromat.
Send a Webhook to a custom URL.

Bulk Submission Exports

When exporting over 10,000 submissions at once, we'll send your exported submissions to your primary Paperform account email address for download.

Depending on the number of exported submissions, it's normal for this to take a few hours while your request is processed.

Partial Submissions

This feature is exclusively available with selected pricing plans.

A Partial Submission is a record of when a respondent began answering questions on the form, but did not click the "Submit" button at the end of the form.

They differ from a regular Submission as, if the form was not completed, your post-submission actions will not trigger. This means that Partial Submissions cannot:

Send Custom Emails.
Trigger Integration Actions.
Generate Custom PDFs.

Partial submissions aren't considered "complete" records of data, and therefore we automatically purge new partial submissions after 30 days on a rolling basis.

Partial Submissions are also missing some data you would find in a regular submission, such as:

Submission ID.
Payment Total.
PDF Summary.

Should you wish to keep your partial submissions past this rolling 30 day period, you'll need to export these manually via your Paperform dashboard. If you'd like to do this regularly, we offer support via our API to view data from your partial submissions on each form.

Products

Product Stock

Total Available Stock

This is the stock value entered for each product within your Paperform product field. This value will only change if it is updated in the field configuration in the form editor.

If no value is entered for stock, this will be shown as "Unlimited".

Remaining Stock

This value is the remaining stock when compared with the number of purchases for this product. When this value reaches 0, it will display "Out of Stock".

If no value is entered for stock, this will be shown as "Unlimited".

Allocated Stock

Allocated Stock is the amount of stock that has been purchased by respondents on your form.

Overview of the Paperform Products dashboard

Caution: Allocated stock can also be set manually. So, if you ever do set it manually, the allocated stock will not correspond to the exact amount of products purchased across all submissions for the form.

Modify Stock Levels

The "Total Available Stock" can be modified from within the form editor by changing the Stock property within the relevant product field's configuration. This is listed under the "Products" tab.

The Stock field in the field configuration menu of a product field

Reset Stock Levels

This option allows you to reset the "Allocated Stock" for a specific product. This can be useful if you sell products in batches, without the need to directly modify the form editor.

The reset button listed on the products dashboard to reset the allocated stock for a specific product

Analytics & Reporting

We offer all plans the opportunity to collect analytics with Paperform, however some features are restricted to selected pricing plans. All subscription plans have the ability to connect Paperform to Google Analytics, to learn more please see our guide here.

Exclusively available with selected pricing plans, Paperform offers analytics and reporting features directly via your dashboard. With these plans, you also have the option to use your own analytics scripts by following our guide here.

All of our help center articles for "analytics" can be found here.

Reporting

Reports

The Reports dashboard offers insight into how respondents answered questions on your form. Reporting supports most field types.

Questions Summary

Each Report starts with a question summary that lists the questions on a form and what percentage of respondents have answered it.

The appearance of the charts depends on the question type. If the question has a fixed set of answers, those responses will display on the left-hand side of the chart, along with the data underneath it.

These types of questions are:

Country
Dropdown
Matrix
Multiple choice
Product
Ranking
Rating
Scale
Slider
Subscription
Yes/No

Fixed answers with visual chart and details below it

If the question requests input from the person filling out the form, the question along with the various answers will display.

These types of questions are:

Address
Color Picker
Date/Time
Email
Image
Number
Phone number
Price
Signature
Text
URL

Open-ended answers with question above and answers below.

Note: We don’t currently support reporting for File Upload, Calculation, Hidden, or Appointment fields.

Question Data & Links

Under each question in the reports section, there’s data regarding how many times it was answered, how many times it was skipped, and if applicable, an overall result.

There’s also a link icon that allows you to copy a link directly to this section of the report, to easily reference later on.

Answered

This is the number of times a question has been answered by the respondents.

Skipped

This is the number of times the question has not been answered by the respondents.

By default, all questions require an answer, but you can make a question required or optional on your forms.

Exporting your report

If you'd like to export your Reports, click "Print" shown in the top right of the page. This will produce a print-ready A4-sized copy of the page.

The Print button shown on the Report page

Analytics

The Analytics dashboard offers a detailed look at how many people have submitted your form, using intuitive graphing to make data easy to understand. This feature is exclusively available with selected pricing plans.

Using Analytics

Filters

You can apply a number of filters to your results to help analyze data from your form. These include filtering by any of the following options:

An overview of the filtering options available on the Analytics page for your form

Device Type

The type of device a respondent used to complete your form. You can sort by:

All Devices
Mobile Devices
Tablet Devices
Desktop Devices

The list of device filters available on the analytics dashboard

This can be helpful for identifying where respondents are most likely to use your forms, based on the type of device used.

Date Range

The date range for viewing your form data. You can set this using the calendar presented by clicking the button shown below:

An example of the calendar selection widget on the analytics dashboard, used to filter results

This can be helpful when generating your own reports for a specific date range or quarter of the year.

Comparison Date

This option allows you to add a set of data specified by a custom date range. This comparison data is shown on your graphs with a green line.

Y and X Axis

To fully customize your experience, the Y and X axis of the graphs can be modified using the controls in the upper right.

An example of how the X and Y axis filter options look on the analytics page

For the Y axis, you can choose from:

Views

The total number of views on your form.

Viewers

The number of unique viewers that have opened the form page.

Started

For the number of Views on your form, this is the volume of people who began completing fields on the form.

Submissions

The number of people who successfully submitted your form, using the submit button.

Completion rate

Of the number of people who started the form, this is the percentage rate of people who completed a successful submission.

Total sales live

This is the total value of any sales made on your form using a live payment integration, as opposed to a test account.

Total sales test

This is the total value of any sales made on your form using a test payment integration, as opposed to a live account.

For the X axis, you can sort by:

Hour
Day
Week
Month
Year

An overview of the analytics page, including use of the Comparison Date feature

The blue line on the graph shows results for the date range you select, while the green line shows the results for the comparison you have selected.

The green line will not be visible on your graph if the comparison is set to "Nothing".

Exporting CSV

If you'd like to export your analytics as a .csv file, you can do so by clicking the "Export CSV" at the top-right of the page. This will automatically download a file with your analytics results matching the filters and date range selected.