AI Summary
You’ve got a form that isn’t converting as well as you’d like, and you can’t tell which part of it is losing people. That’s usually the moment someone starts looking at form analytics tools.
The good news is that if you’re already using WPForms, you don’t need a separate form analytics tool, as the plugin offers native analytics all the way down to field-level insights!
In this post I’ll cover what built-in form reports already track, where a dedicated tool may still earn its place, and how both compare to wiring up form tracking in Google Analytics.
Form Analytics Tools vs. Built-In Reports: What You Actually Need
The Short Answer on Form Performance Tracking
If all your forms live on one WordPress site and the thing you want to know is which fields lose people, built-in reports from WPForms cover that.
You get views, interactions, conversion rate, abandonments and errors for every form, plus a per-field breakdown with the average time visitors spend in each one, and none of it needs a tracking script.
A dedicated tool starts making sense once you need to observe real sessions directly, but WPForms offers a User Journey addon which helps track those too.
That said, the full analytics experience needs a WPForms Pro license or higher. On Lite, Basic and Plus you still get the Views column counting your form views, while Interactions and Conversion show a lock icon.
What Built-In Form Reports Already Cover
WPForms Analytics arrived with version 2.0 and tracks every published form on its own, so there’s nothing to switch on and no snippet to paste anywhere.
The first place you’ll run into it is WPForms » All Forms, where three columns now sit beside Entries.
Those totals let you compare forms at a glance, so a form pulling plenty of views with a weak conversion rate stands out straight away.
Clicking any of the numbers, or hovering a form and clicking Analytics, opens that form’s own report.
Five Metrics Tracked on Every Form
Each form gets a card for five metrics:
- Views: How many times the form appeared on a visitor’s screen.
- Interactions: How many times visitors engaged with the fields, like clicking into one or typing in it.
- Conversion Rate: The share of views that ended in a submission.
- Abandonments: Visitors who started filling the form and left without sending it, shown as a count and a percentage.
- Errors: Ssubmissions that failed validation, also shown as a count and a percentage.
The detail I’d pay attention to is how a view gets counted. It registers when the form actually enters the visible part of the page, not every time the page loads.
If your form sits in the footer and a visitor leaves after reading the top of the page, no view is recorded, which keeps your conversion rate tied to people who genuinely saw the thing.
Field-by-Field Analytics
Below the cards, the Form Fields table breaks your form down one field at a time. Every field gets views, interactions, abandonments, errors and the average time visitors spend inside it.
Fields with more than one input are tracked separately, so a Name field set to show first and last name appears as two rows. That’s how you find out the last name input is causing the hesitation rather than the field as a whole.
Field views follow the same visibility rule as form views, so on a long form it’s normal for the counts to drop as you move down the list.
The drop-off tells you how far down the form people get before they quit, and the quickest way to find the field slowing everyone down is to sort the table by Avg. Time.
Reset Order puts it back into your form’s field order afterwards. The complete guide to Form Analytics covers the rest of how the table behaves.
Abandonment Tracking and Conversion Goals
Most people who start a form never finish it, and the form abandonment statistics put that at roughly two thirds.
The Abandonments card gives you both the count and the percentage for your own forms, and an abandonment is logged after an hour of inactivity rather than the second someone switches tabs.
Getting some of those people back takes the Form Abandonment addon, available on Pro and higher, which captures partial entries from visitors who typed something and left and turns part of that percentage into leads you can actually contact.
You can also hold each form to a target. Click Set Goal on the Conversion Rate card, enter the percentage you’re aiming for, and the card starts comparing your live rate against it with a green arrow when you’re above and a red one when you’re below.
Date Ranges, Exports, and AI-Assisted Reading
Reports open on the last 30 days by default, which is usually the range you want. The date dropdown carries presets from Today through Last 1 year, and Custom lets you pick your own start and end dates from a calendar.
For anything that has to leave WordPress, Export CSV hands you the form’s analytics data as a spreadsheet, and Print Report opens a print-friendly version you can save as a PDF for a client.
If it’s the submissions you’re after rather than the performance data, you can export your entries to a spreadsheet separately.
There’s a plain-language layer on top of all this as well.
Clicking the sparkle icon opens WPForms AI, which reads the form’s analytics data and answers questions like which fields have the most drop-offs, adding small charts and comparison tables when you ask it to compare periods or forms.
It’s capped at 50 requests a day and that allowance is shared with the other AI features in the plugin, so it’s worth saving for the questions you can’t answer by reading the table yourself.
Why Built-In Reports Beat GA4 Event Tracking for Forms
Most people comparing form analytics tools have a third option sitting in the background, which is to wire up form tracking in the analytics they already run. It costs nothing extra, so it deserves a fair look.
The practical problems with that approach show up quickly once you try it. GA4 gives you no field-level detail at all unless you build custom events in Tag Manager, so the question you started with, which field loses people, stays unanswered.
Enhanced Measurement’s form tracking catches form starts reliably enough but frequently misses the actual submission, and it doesn’t handle forms that submit over AJAX, which is how these forms submit by default.
It won’t segment multiple forms for you automatically either, and a submission that failed validation can be logged as a completion when a required field was left blank. Event-level data is kept for two months by default and 14 months at most on a standard property.
None of that makes Google Analytics a bad product, but it’s built to measure sessions and traffic across an entire site, which is a different job from measuring one form’s fields, and the two work perfectly well side by side.
MonsterInsights is the usual way to bring GA4 reporting into WordPress and if you’d rather build the events yourself, there’s a walkthrough for tracking form submissions in Google Analytics 4.
Whose Numbers Can You Trust?
Four things stay out of built-in WPForms’ reports automatically.
- Form previews: Never counted, so building and testing a form leaves no trace in its stats.
- Logged-in staff: Administrators, Editors and Authors aren’t tracked, which keeps your own visits out of your totals.
- Spam: Blocked submissions never reach the stats.
- Off-screen fields: A field that never entered the viewport isn’t counted as viewed.
That last exclusion matters more than it sounds like it would, because a conversion rate built on page loads counts every visitor who never scrolled far enough to see your form and quietly drags the number down.
The privacy side is equally straightforward for anyone who has to answer questions about it. Built-in reports set no cookies, store no personal information about your visitors, and keep everything in your own WordPress database instead of shipping it to an outside service.
If you do want Google’s numbers alongside them, the Google Analytics integration handles that connection for you. Compare any of that with DIY event tracking, where your QA passes, your staff and passing bots all land in the same bucket as real visitors until you remember to filter them out.
Form Analytics Tools Compared: Built-In, Dedicated, and GA4
The matrix below lays out the same information in one place, with the three options as columns rather than specific products, because what separates them is the class of capability and not the brand name.
| Capability | Built-in form reports | Dedicated form analytics tool | GA4 event tracking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per-field drop-off | Yes | Yes | Only with custom events |
| Time spent per field | Yes | Yes | No |
| Error and validation tracking | Yes | Yes | Unreliable |
| Abandonment rate | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Conversion goal per form | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Session replay | No | Yes | No |
| Heatmaps | No | Yes | No |
| A/B testing form variants | No | Yes | No |
| Re-fill or correction rate | No | Yes | No |
| Device segmentation | No | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-step funnel visuals | No | Yes | Partial |
| Forms outside WordPress | No | Yes | Yes |
| Works without cookies | Yes | Varies | No |
| Data stays in your database | Yes | No | No |
| Setup required | None | Tracking script | Custom events |
| Cost model | Included in license | Recurring subscription | Free, plus your time |
FAQs About Form Analytics Tools
Contact form analytics comes up constantly once people realise the reports are already sitting in their dashboard. These are the questions that come up most often about what the built-in reports do and don’t cover.
Does WPForms track form abandonment without an addon?
Yes for the metric itself, since the Abandonments card and the per-field abandonment column are both part of the analytics page on Pro and higher, where an abandonment is counted after an hour of inactivity. Capturing the partial entry, meaning the data someone actually typed before leaving, is what the Form Abandonment addon adds on top.
Can I see which field people give up on?
That’s exactly what the Form Fields table is for. Each field gets its own row showing views, interactions, abandonments, errors and average time, and multi-input fields like Name split into separate rows so you can tell which input caused the problem.
Do I still need Google Analytics for my forms?
For most sites yes, though not for this particular question. Google Analytics answers questions about traffic and sessions across your whole site, while form reports answer questions about one form’s fields. Running both is normal and they don’t overlap much.
Why are my form views lower than my page views?
Because a form view only counts when the form reaches the visitor’s screen. Someone who lands on a page and leaves before scrolling down to a form further along adds a page view and no form view, which keeps your conversion rate based on people who actually saw it.
Next, Put Your Form Analytics to Work
Once you’ve found the field costing you submissions, the next job is fixing it, and our guide on how to improve your form conversion rate covers the changes worth trying first.
If the field table points at one specific input, start there instead of redesigning the whole form. Changing one thing at a time is the only way you’ll know which change actually did the work.
Start Tracking Your Form Fields 🙂
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