Third Party Tracking for Online Forms
Adding third party tracking to forms is a popular step for optimizing the forms’ performance. Being able to see the metrics for your form and visitors helps form owners and marketers improve the user experience and conversion rate, among many other things.
Some key performance indicators for form performance include:
- Number of visitors
- Successful submissions
- Order quantities and amounts
- Time spent
- Incomplete forms
- Fall-off pages
While Formsite has some of these performance indicators built-in, many form owners choose to add third party tracking to forms and other places to trigger analytics scripts. Adding these triggers depends on what they’re tracking and choosing the correct scripts and placement is critical.
Third Party Tracking
Many tracking services are available and they all work by inserting a small bit of code into the page you want to track. Some currently popular services include:
- https://analytics.google.com/
- https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel
- https://heapanalytics.com/
- https://statcounter.com/
- https://www.w3counter.com/
- https://get.gaug.es/
- https://www.hotjar.com/
- https://chartbeat.com/
Choosing a service depends mostly on the data needed and some services are more suited for different kinds of forms. For example, some of the third party tracking services provide maps showing click activity, while others show charts and graphs. If total visitors and conversions are needed, then Google Analytics is the industry standard.
Placement & Syntax
The tracking system chosen requires adding some code to the form in order to communicate the tracked data. The location of the code depends on what is to be tracked.
Most often, tracking successful form submissions is the goal so placing the code on the Success Page is the best place to trigger the script:
Adding code to the Success Page
- Start by making the Success Page using the Custom format
- After the text and design is complete, deselect the setting to Enable text editor
- Paste the tracking code into the top of the code, being sure to include the <script> tags
- Save and test
If the metrics to be tracked are more than the successful submissions, placing the code on the form may be required:
Adding code to the form’s <head> (recommended)
- In the form editor, clicking the Style link then the Advanced link shows a box to add the code to the form’s HTML Head area. Most tracking scripts will require placement in this area.
Adding code to the form’s <body>
- Occasionally the tracking service requires code to appear in the body of the page. A Custom Code item can be added to the top of the form to load the script before the items to be tracked.
Tracking embedded forms
Embedded forms may complicate things depending on the data being tracked and whether the hosting site contains additional tracking code. Pushing data from the form to the hosting page is possible, but targeting the embedded form is harder due to cross-domain restrictions.
Tracking embedded forms is easiest if the form does the tracking. Follow either of the regular tracking instructions above. If the host website has the tracking code already then adding the code to the form may result in duplicate counts. Take care to avoid duplicates by testing and adding custom Javascript to detect duplicate code.
Privacy
The imminent GDPR rules includes information about user tracking and privacy issues. When implementing any tracking system, take care to prevent recording personal information.
If the chosen tracking system collects personal information, be sure to include a disclaimer and provide the ability to either opt-out or leave the form to avoid tracking.