How-To Guide: Tracking Form Submissions with Google Tag Manager

Form submissions are one of the most common conversion actions on a website, whether for signing up for a newsletter, registering for an event, or submitting a contact request. These conversions are also often the key goal of email, social media, or other digital marketing campaigns. Tracking form submissions is an important part of any digital measurement strategy, but as a result of the variety of available tools, plugins, and scripts for implementing forms on a website, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for tracking form submissions. So what’s the best approach? If your form has a unique “Thank You” page, then the basic pageview tracking of Google Analytics or another tool may be enough for you to measure form completions. In GA, you can configure a destination goal based on the thank you page URL. However, if a visitor could possibly return to that thank you page directly (via a bookmark or link from a confirmation email), then a simple destination goal would likely overstate the number of actual submissions. The situation is further complicated if your form does not submit to a unique URL, (i.e. dynamically updates on the same page) or if it submits to an external site that you are unable to track (e.g. 3rd-party payment processing). In such cases, tracking the actual submit action of the form may be essential. If you are using Google Tag Manager, there is a built-in capability for identifying form submissions and triggering analytics tags as a result. Note that GTM’s “Form” trigger is limited in the types of forms that it can handle. See … Continue reading How-To Guide: Tracking Form Submissions with Google Tag Manager