Track Forms Without a Thank You Page in GTM [GA4 Update]

No matter what kind of business you are running, you want to make sure you track all of your leads.

Setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics is the way to get a better understanding of where your leads are coming from. You can get valuable data from this that you can use to optimise your website or marketing channels.

Back in the days, most contact forms had a separate thank you page hosted on a different URL. You could easily track your forms by setting up a goal with this URL.

However, we notice that more and more websites are using a different approach. Instead of a separate thank you page, visitors will stay on the same page. Then, they simply get a notification that their message has been delivered.

A lot of WordPress plugins, like Contact Form 7, are using a similar approach.

In this article, I will give you a step-by-step guide on how you can track these contact forms regardless.

Pre-step: install Google Tag Manager

Now, we are going to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for this.

If you are not familiar with GTM yet, have a look at our introduction to Google Tag Manager article. We highly recommend to set this up for your website, as it will make tracking a lot easier going forward.

GTM also enables to set up additional tracking, like the one described in this article.

Once you installed GTM you can follow the next steps to track your contact forms.

Step 1: check your website code

Go to the page where your contact form is located. On the button, press right click and click inspect. This will open a side screen if your working in Google Chrome.

Now, you want to copy the part that is behind the class= tag. In this example that would be “gform_button button”.

Step 2: add custom variables to GTM

Next, we will need to add a custom variable to GTM.

Go to the GTM container of your website and go to “Variables” in the left-hand menu.

Then, click configure and find “Click Classes” on the list and make sure “Click Classes” is enabled.

Step 3: Create a trigger in GTM

Go to “Triggers” in the left-hand menu and click New to add a new trigger.

For Trigger Type select Click – All Elements. Then, fire this trigger for some clicks.

Lastly, select Click Classes contains whatever you copied from step 1.

Step 4: Create an Event Tag in GTM

Go to Tags in the left-hand menu and add a new tag.

Select Google Analytics: GA4 as the Tag Type.

Then, select Event for the Track Type.

Basically, you can fill in anything you think would suit for the Event Name. I would recommend using Google’s standard naming conventions for this, as it will improve the reporting. In the case of lead generation, this would be generate_lead.

That’s it from the GTM end. Make sure you publish your changes!

Step 5: Add a goal in Google Analytics

Now, we will need to go to GA4 to make one final goal. You will need to get some data in Google Analytics, so I would recommend doing a test conversion first and wait until this data is populated within Google Analytics. You might have to wait 24 hours for this.

Once the data is in Google Analytics, all we need to do is mark this event as a conversion.

To do this, simply go to the Google Analytics admin area > Data display > Events.

Then, toggle the “mark as a conversion” on for the generate_lead event.

En voila you will be tracking your contact form even without a thank you page. Additionally, make sure you track your phone calls in Google Ads as well!

Form Tracking in GTM FAQ

Yes, you can. The easiest way to do this is by installing Google Tag Manager on your website. This will make it easy to track certain button clicks on your website, which will allow you to track forms even if they don’t have a separate thank-you page.

You can track leads from Contact Form 7 by setting up extra triggers in Google Tag Manager. By setting up an event in both GTM and Google Analytics you can make sure that your Contact Form 7 leads are being tracked as a goal within Google Analytics.

In most cases, you will have to set up additional triggers within Google Tag Manager. It’s easy, just follow the steps in our article.

No. You will need to set up additional tracking and goals to make this work.