Integrating Google Analytics (GA) or adding Google Tag Manager (GTM) code at the back of your forms increases your options of getting to know more about the interactions and engagements that happen on your forms. Emailmeform offers great insights on your forms and the data you collect through them but if you are one of those who like to know about each and every step or action that your users take on your forms then you would definitely be interested in knowing about how to add GA or GTM to your forms.
In this post, we are going to share with you how to integrate GA or GTM on your forms and how you can take advantage of them to know more about the traffic coming to your forms. You can also look at a couple of important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can track in order to see the progress of your forms.
Now let’s get started.
Tracking Forms with Google Analytics
Integrating Google Analytics with your forms is extremely easy. All you have to do is open up a form on the Form Manager page and click on the “Notifications” button. Once inside, select the “Google Analytics” icon and place your GA Property ID in the given field. Save it and you are ready to go.
Note: It is important to activate the GA option on all your forms individually. By activating it on one account, it will not automatically activate the tracking of other forms.
What do I get by adding Google Analytics on my Forms?
By linking your GA account with your form, the form will work as one of the pages of your website and you would be able to look at the data/traffic coming to this page (form) in your GA account as if it is a part of your website. Even if you are using it as a standalone form, you can still view the data traffic coming to it.
Here are the cool things you can do after linking GA to your form.
1. Real Time Traffic Data
Even though you would be able to see the Submission data in real time on Emailmeform, what Google Analytics can offer you is more insights on the traffic you receive on your forms. So if users are visiting your forms but they are not submitting or completing them then you would be able to spot that quickly as you would be monitoring the traffic through the “Real Time” feature of Google Analytics.
2. General Traffic Data
Emailmeform gives you the basic insights about the traffic on your forms, by integrating your forms with GA, however, you would be able to learn much more about the type of traffic that you received. Your users’ Geolocation, Channels through which they came, Devices they used to access your form etc. You can also look at how the paid traffic (Adwords/Facebook etc) or Social Media Traffic responded to your forms.
This will give you more power to understand your audience and make changes on your form, if required, based on the data that you see.
3. Conversion Tracking
A form may have more than one goal (please refer to our previous post for more information on how to set and monitor goals) and it’s important to track them to know more about the conversion rate that it receives. There are a couple of ways to track goals through GA:
- Destination Goal
For nearly all one page basic forms, the main goal is the total number of submissions that you receive. This can be tracked through the destination URL goal. An easy way to set it up is by adding the following details in the “Destination Page” section:
The /confirm/ page is what is generally shown once user submits the form. However, if you have set a redirect then you can track submissions through GTM, which we will share later in this blog post.
Once you have the Destination goal set, every time you receive a submission you will be able to monitor it in real time as well:
This will help in identifying the conversion rate of any form. Plus, it is extremely good metric for the sales and marketing teams as they will be able to see the leads they have generated or the number of form completions they have received through different types of marketing campaigns that they might be running.
- Multi Page form and Funnel visualization
Usually, on every 2 pages of a form that uses the pagination feature, the URL changes and so we can use the unique urls of these pages to track the complete flow till the Confirmation/Thank you page. This can be done through the same process shown above and all we have to do is to activate the funnels toggle and set up the previous pages in the correct order.
However, if you want to track all fields and pages then you will have to do it via GTM by pushing virtual page url for each page. We will share it in the GTM section of this post.
Adding Google Tag Manager code at the back of your form
Adding GTM to your forms is not at all difficult anymore as it used to be. You don’t need to find random places to add the code and pray that it works. Emailmeform offers an easy DIY method that allows you to add GTM code at the back of each form. All you need to do is go to the Form Builder Editor and choose the Form Setting tab. Look for the “Header/Footer” option and click on the Edit button.
Once inside, select the HTML tab and click on the “Source” button in the Header section.
Here you can paste the previously generated GTM code:
Click the ‘Close” button at the bottom and then save the form. Refresh it and you will see the GTM code working on your form.
If you are using the new GTM code that has 2 sections then you can either add both of them in the header or can add the top part of the code in the header and the bottom part in the footer.
What advantages do you get from GTM?
Once you have GTM added to your forms, complete tracking world is now at your fingertips. All types of advanced tracking can be done through the GTM. For example:
1. Event/Button Tracking
There can be a lot of different buttons that you may want to track — such as the main submission button, file uploads, custom buttons, maps, etc., in order to know more about the interactions you receive on the form. You may want to add a map that shows your store and a button that shows the store address. You might have a button that shows the phone number etc. You can track all of these buttons via GTM.
2. Video Tracking
You can track any video that you add on the form and look at the data like the number of times it was viewed, paused or played in X%. You can also add a Call-To-Action button at the end of the video and track that as well.
3. URL Redirect Tracking
As how we discussed it above, we can track the destination URL if we want to track the confirmation page or if we want to track a submission but in the case where there is a URL Redirect placed then you will have to either track the main Submit button or you can fire an event on successful Form Submission via GTM.
Through any of these two methods you would be able to track the submissions that you receive. The Form Submission method is more accurate than simple event tracking of the submit button.
4. Form Field Tracking
In some cases you may want to track each and every field of your form in order to know which field might be creating a bottleneck. You can do this through the “On_hover” or “On_blur” tracking via GTM. This way you would know exactly which fields are filled in and which are getting ignored.
5. Using Virtual Pageviews to track form with Pagination
Similar to what we shared above, you can track multi-page forms through destination url goal setting on Google Analytics. However, if you want to track each and every page of a multipage form then you will have to fire a virtual page every time the “Next Button” is clicked. This way you can allot a different virtual page to all the pages of a multi page form and see the funnel visualization on GTM.
Taking Advantage of the Data
Once you have GA/GTM or both integrated with your form, you will be able to get more data coming through your form. Now you would be able to analyze the performance of your forms far better than before. We suggest on checking our “Important KPIs” blog post so that you can learn more on how you can take advantage of the data you collect.
Every form has margin for improvement when it comes to design, layout, structure and marketing. Emailmeform offers many options to test different styles and pattern of your forms and analyze the data to see which variation is performing better. A the end of the day, we all want a high converting form for your business or personal needs and the elaborated tracking techniques can give you better insights about your forms.
Jovana Milankovic
Jovana is a content creator and marketing manager at EmailMeForm. Her job is to curate our software to the world and make it more human for our users.
