Forms can have many shapes and purposes. We have contact forms, comment forms, registration forms, search forms, and many more. In this article, we will learn how to track them with tools integrated with WP Full Picture’s integrations.
What are the 4 methods of tracking form submissions
There are generally 4 ways to track form submissions.
- Tracking a submission event of an HTML form
- Tracking when a “Form sent” message is shown
- Tracking when a “Form sent” confirmation page is displayed
- Tracking clicks in the “Send” button
Each of these methods will be a good choice for some forms and a worse for others. Let’s go over them one by one and see when they should be used.
Tracking a submission event of an HTML form
This tracking method should be used on forms that:
- Refresh the page after the “Send” button is clicked
- Always successfully send data to server (shows no errors after the submission and ask for correcting content of some fields)
It is best to be used to track search forms (that redirect visitors to search results) or anonymous feedback forms (where visitors don’t enter their emails and any response is sent).
To track these forms, use the “Track form submissions” settings of your chosen tracking tool integration.
You can learn how to use these fields from this documentation article.
Tracking when a “Form sent” message is shown
This tracking method should be used on forms that:
- Do not redirect or refresh the page after the “Send” button is clicked
- display a “success” message when the form is successfully sent
To track these forms, you need to use the “Element visibility” tracking function and enter, in the first field, the HTML selector to the success message.
Tracking when a “Form sent” confirmation page is displayed
Use this tracking method to track forms that redirect you to a different page after the form is successfully submitted. To use this method, you do not need to do any special setup of your tracking tools. Simply, find the “page popularity” report in your tracking tool and see the number of unique visitors who saw th
Tracking clicks in the “Send” button
This is the simplest method of tracking form submissions but use it only when other methods fail.
It can be used to:
- Track forms that always send data (it doesn’t matter if the page refreshes after the “Send” button is clicked or not)
- Track forms with more than 1 field. Single-field forms are often submitted by clicking the “Enter” button which will not be tracked.
To track clicks in the “Send” buttons, use the basic click tracking settings in the settings of your WP Full Picture’s integrations.
