Glossary
Form abandonment
When a respondent starts a form but leaves before submitting.
Form abandonment is the gap between starts and submissions: someone engaged enough to begin, then left. It is distinct from people who never started — abandonment is a friction signal from people who were genuinely interested, which makes it the highest-value thing to diagnose.
Per-question drop-off localises it. A sharp cliff at one field — a phone number, a long open text box, an unexpected payment step — points to the exact cause far better than the aggregate completion rate does. Read the field that loses people, not the average.
Common remedies: move the heaviest field later or remove it, split a long form into a multi-page form so progress is visible, soften required-field rules, and preserve partial submissions so the data already entered is not lost when the tab closes. Fix one suspected cause at a time so you can attribute the change.