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3 Easy Ways to Track Form Submissions
Want to track form fills on your website? Here are three easy ways to track form submissions and understand which marketing channels influenced that new lead.
Tracking form submissions is essential to understanding which marketing channels and campaigns are working.
We surveyed 200 businesses and found that 84% of marketers use forms as a conversion tool but 36% of those struggled to track them.
So why are marketers falling behind when it comes to tracking form fills on their site?
Website forms are the lifeblood for businesses to drive new leads and customers.
But, it’s clear that help is needed to allow businesses to go beyond just counting the total number of inbound leads.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
💡 Pro Tip
Ruler takes out the hard work when it comes to tracking form submissions. It tracks your customer journeys on a visitor level, allowing you to attribute closed revenue back to your form submissions across multiple campaigns, ads, keywords and more. It also does the same for calls and live chat enquiries.
Book a demo to see how Ruler tracks forms
Many businesses rely on forms on their website to drive new leads and customers. A form fill is simply when a website visitor completes a lead form hosted on your website.
This form submission usually prompts a new lead in your CRM, or a new email to your sales team.
If you’re working in any industry that isn’t eCommerce then you likely rely on forms on your website to drive new leads.
Form submissions are a great way to drive new business through your site.
But, marketers struggle to understand which marketing channels and campaigns influence form fills or leads.
And even worse, they can’t pinpoint where their high-quality leads come from.
Form submissions in themselves aren’t hard to track.
If you’ve connected your site to your CRM, when a new lead comes through a form, your CRM will likely automatically pull it into its database.
Or perhaps you’ve set up a goal to track your count of form fills in Google Analytics.
What’s difficult is connecting your new lead to their previous marketing touchpoints.
Since you can’t track an anonymous user on your website, you can’t connect an anonymous web session to an inbound form submission.
So, if you want to learn which channel or campaign referred that user to your site then you’ll need to employ better lead tracking tactics.
Form submissions are a great way to collect data from your website visitors who are ready to be contacted by your sales or service team.
Tracking form fills to measure your lead volume is a great first step. Even better is tracking your individual form submissions and tracking them till the point of sale.
By tracking your form submissions through the entire customer journey, you can:
There are three main ways to track form submissions without much, if any, need for web development.
The three best ways to track form submissions are:
Attribution tools are the best method for tracking form submissions because they provide visibility over the customer journey.
We may sound biassed, but hear us out.
With a marketing attribution tool, you can assign credit to the different touchpoints or interactions that led to a form submission and track the customer journey from initial awareness to the point of conversion.
Take Ruler, for example.
Ruler allows you to track your form submissions, in real time, and pass the data over to your CRM. Once a sale is made, Ruler attributes that sale to the marketing channel it came from.
This means you can see where customers who completed form submissions are coming from, as opposed to just conversions. Then, you can optimise your marketing outputs and budgets.
That’s not all. Ruler also has marketing mix modelling, allowing you to gain aggregated data over users who didn’t click on any of your links but were influenced to fill out a form after viewing one of your ads.
By taking the best of Ruler’s multi-touch attribution and MMM, you can:
💡 Get the full story
Track where your leads came from and make data-driven decisions to bring in more revenue through your best-performing marketing channels with Ruler. See how Ruer can make your marketing measurement and form tracking easier with a guided demo.
Book a demo and get more visibility of leads
If you’re looking for something a little more simple, then you can use Google Analytics to track your form submissions.
If your form, after submission, leads to a thank you page or similar, then you can create a custom event in Google Analytics 4 and turn that into a conversion.
We have a dedicated guide to conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 that shows you the process in more detail, which we highly recommend you read.
But, for now, here’s a quick step-by-step guide to help get you started:
1. Log into your GA4 property, go to ‘Configure” > ‘Events’ > “Create Event“.
2. Give your custom event a name and set up your condition settings. In the example below, the configuration will trigger a new conversion event whenever someone views a thank you page after submitting a form.
3. Once you’ve set up your custom event, click Create.
4. Now go to Conversions. You should see your custom event listed. All you do is mark it as a conversion using the slider, and you’re good to go. Don’t panic if you don’t see your custom event. Sometimes it can take a while for it to appear.
Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and track your form submissions against your traffic sources and favourite metrics.
Keep in mind that Google Analytics only tracks your lead quantity. Out of the box, it can’t track the value of your leads and their impact on the pipeline generation.
💡 Don’t forget
Ruler lets you track your leads, how far they make it into the sales funnel, and whether or not they convert into revenue. Above all, it lets you attribute revenue through the lens of different attribution models—unlike Google Analytics 4.
Book a demo to see how ruler attributes revenue
What if a form on your website doesn’t redirect to a “thank you” page? Well, this is where things get a little tricky.
One option is to configure an event in Google Tag Manager to track the submission button on your form as a conversion.
If you’re using GTM, you can set up a “Trigger” which will listen out for any interactions made on your form button.
This will fire a conversion tag and allow you to view and track your form submissions in Google Analytics 4.
We’ll be honest with you. Setting up a custom event in Google Tag Manager can get complex, especially if you’re not very familiar with how it works.
Also, it’s impossible to show you in one short paragraph how to configure an event for your form submission in Google Tag Manager.
But not to panic. We have a great step-by-step guide in our blog post on Google Analytics conversion tracking that you can follow.
Now you know how to track form fills from your website. And, even better, with Ruler in place, you can go beyond lead volume.
With a marketing attribution tool in place, you can track leads through their full customer journey and attribute any closed revenue back to the influencing marketing channels, campaigns and ads.
You won’t just be able to track your form fills, you’ll be able to automatically track calls, live chat and place them as part of full customer journeys.
Learn more about tracking full customer journeys with Ruler, or book a demo with our team to see the data in action.
