How to set up WordPress form tracking in GA4

How to Set Up WordPress Form Tracking in GA4 (The Easy Way)

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Do you want to set up WordPress form tracking in GA4?

Tracking form submissions in Google Analytics can help you see which of your forms are performing best and how website visitors are finding the forms on your site.

In this beginners’ step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to set up Google Analytics 4 for form tracking the easy way—no complicated tags, custom events, or code required!

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Can Google Analytics Track Forms?

The easiest way to track form submissions is to link your site to Google Analytics.  With GA4, you can track when someone submits a form and measure the percentage of visitors that submitted the form (your form conversion rate.)

GA4 can give you a lot of valuable real-time information about how visitors are using the forms on your site, including:

  • Which forms are getting the most views
  • Which forms are performing best
  • The pages visitors visited before submitting a form
  • How users found your website before submitting a form

It can be quite complicated to set up form tracking in Google Analytics. If you do it all manually, you need to use Google Tag Manager and create tracking events and triggers.

But don’t worry if you’re not an expert because you can use the MonsterInsights WordPress plugin to do all the hard work for you! MonsterInsights connects to Google Analytics, and displays form data from GA4 in a user-friendly format right in your WordPress dashboard.

How to Set Up WordPress Form Tracking in GA4

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the steps of Installing MonsterInsights, linking it to Google Analytics 4, and viewing data about your forms.

1. Install WPForms

Before you do anything else, you’ll need a form to track! WPForms is the best form plugin for WordPress as it’s powerful yet so simple to use, you can get your first form live and working within a few minutes.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins » Add New and click the Install Now button on the WPForms plugin.

Installing WPForms Lite

Click the Activate button to activate the plugin. If this is your first time using WPForms, you’ll see an invitation to Start the WPForms Challenge. This will take you through the process of setting up a simple contact form on your site.

2. Download and Install MonsterInsights

While most tutorials will tell you to go to Google Analytics and set up GTM (Google Tag Manager) in the Admin area at this point, we want to do things the easy way!

MonsterInsights is really simple to get set up and working with Google Analytics. Instead of cutting and pasting code and custom HTML and switching back and forth between your site and GA4, you can just install the plugin and it will manage everything for you.

MonsterInsights Google Analytics report

With the help of this plugin, you can easily set up event tracking, custom dimensions, outbound link tracking, and much more. Some other benefits of using MonsterInsights include:

  • Ecommerce tracking: You can easily set up WooCommerce tracking in MonsterInsights to optimize your online store.
  • No thank you page needed: With manual form tracking, you need to set up a thank you page or custom GA4 event to track form submissions, but this is not necessary with MonsterInsights.
  • One-time setup: Once you’ve configured MonsterInsights to track your forms, it will automatically track all the different forms on your site.
  • Events tracking: You can set the form submission event in GA4 as a conversion to measure your ROI and site performance over time.

MonsterInsights Pro comes with a Forms addon that will handle all your form submission tracking and display the data for you in WordPress. So get started by heading over to MonsterInsights and signing up for a Pro license.

Once you’ve completed checkout, click the Download Now button to get the plugin.

Download MonsterInsights

Don’t close your browser window yet, as you’ll need to copy your license key in a moment.

Go to your WordPress dashboard in another tab and navigate to Plugin » Add New.

Click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the Plugins page.

Upload plugin

Click the Choose File button and find the zip file you just downloaded from MonsterInsights. Next, click the Install Now button to install the MonsterInsights plugin.

Install MonsterInsights

When the plugin has finished installing, click Activate Plugin.

Activate plugin in WordPress

This should take you to a MonsterInsights welcome screen. You’ll see a warning message at the top that you have not entered your license key yet. Click the link that says, “Please click here to enter your license key and begin receiving updates and reports.”

MonsterInsights welcome screen with license key message

This will take you to the general settings page for the plugin.

Go back to the browser tab you left on the MonsterInsights page and copy your license key.

Copy MonsterInsights license key

Return to your WordPress site and paste your license key in the License Key field.

MonsterInsights license key

MonsterInsights is now installed, but it won’t start collecting data until you link it to your Google Analytics account.

If you already have a Google Analytics account, scroll down and click Connect MonsterInsights

connect MonsterInsights

You can then skip to the next step, Connect MonsterInsights with Google Analytics.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, head over to the Google Analytics website.

Google Analytics homepage

Click Start measuring to sign up for a Google Analytics account.

When you create a new account, you’ll need to fill out information, including your account name (this can be the name of your website or anything you like). The default settings on the rest of this page are ok to leave as they are. Scroll down and click Next to continue to the next step of the wizard.

Google Analytics new account wizard

You’ll also need to set up a Google Analytics 4 property, which you’ll connect to later to access your forms data.

Google Analytics create property

Choose your time zone and currency, scroll down, and click Next to continue to the next step in the wizard.

Continue through each step in the wizard, clicking Next at each stage. You’ll need to complete information about your business and accept the terms and conditions of Google Analytics. The final step is to choose where you want to collect data from. As you’re connecting Google Analytics to your WordPress website, click Web.

Start collecting data with Google Analytics

When you click the Web button, a pop-up will appear for you to set up a data stream. This is new in GA4 and replaces views in Universal Analytics. Fill out your website URL and give it a name. Make sure that the Enhanced measurement is set to off, before clicking Create stream to continue.

Google Analytics data stream

Once you complete the setup wizard, you’ll be ready to start collecting data from your website. You can go back to your WordPress dashboard to connect MonsterInsights to your account. It can take up to 48 hours before a new account starts displaying data in Google Analytics.

Connect MonsterInsights with Google Analytics

After you click Connect MonsterInsights, you’ll be asked to choose an account to connect to. Choose the same account you set up your Google Analytics account with.

Link Google account to MonsterInsights

You’ll then need to grant MonsterInsights permissions to connect to your Google Analytics account. Scroll down and click Allow.

Allow MonsterInsights access to your Google data

After you’ve connected your account, choose your data stream from the dropdown, and click Complete Connection.

Connect Google Analytics to your website

MonsterInsights will continue setup with recommended settings. You can leave these as they are unless there’s anything you want to change.

MonsterInsights recommended settings

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save and Continue.

MonsterInsights setup wizard

Choose the website features you want to enable, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Continue. Or, if you’re not sure, leave the default settings and click Skip for Now.

MonsterInsights website features

If all goes well, you should see a final confirmation screen showing that MonsterInsights has successfully connected to Google Analytics, the tracking code is installed, and data is being collected. You can then click Finish Setup & Exit Wizard to return to your WordPress dashboard.

Finish MonsterInsights setup wizard

3. Set Up MonsterInsights for Form Tracking

To activate form tracking in MonsterInsights, you first need to install the Forms addon.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Insights » Forms, scroll down until you see the Forms addon, and click the Install button.

Install forms addon to MonsterAnalytics

Once you’ve clicked the Install button, wait a few minutes while the plugin installs. Once installation is complete, you should see the addon status change to Active.

Forms addon active

You’ve now done all the hard work, and MonsterInsights will track all your forms for you!

4. View Your Form Submissions in WordPress

When you want to see data from the forms users have submitted on your website, there’s no need to go to Google Analytics. You can see all the information on your WordPress dashboard by going to Insights » Reports and then clicking on the Forms tab.

MonsterInsights forms report

This report shows the number of impressions, conversions, and the conversion rate for each form on your site for the specified date range.

You can change the date range of the report by clicking the date range button and choosing one of the preset ranges (Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last 7 Days, or Last 30 Days) or setting a custom date range.

Forms report date range

You can also download the report by clicking the Export PDF Report button.

5. Track User Activity Before Form Submission

Seeing what users did before they filled out and submitted forms on your site can be very useful.

The WPForms User Journey Addon will show you the path a user takes through your site, including:

  • The URL they visited that sent them to your site
  • The search they made to find your site
  • UTM tags from a marketing campaign that sent them to your site
  • The time they spent on your site
  • The pages and posts they visited before they submitted the form

All this information can help you to get valuable insights about where your users come from and how they interact with your site before the form submit event.

The User Journey Addon is available to all WPForms Pro license holders.

To get started, go to WPForms » Addons in your WordPress dashboard, search for “user journey” to find the addon, and click the Install Addon button.

Install user journey addon

After a few moments, the plugin should be installed and activated. You can then view the user journey for each form submission you get on your site.

To see each user journey, go to WPForms » Entries and click on the form you want to see user journeys for. You can then click View on each submission to see full details about the form entry.

View form entry

In the View Entry page, scroll down until you see the User Journey box. This lists full details of everything the user did before they submitted the form, with time stamps and additional information.

User Journey addon for WPForms

You can use this information to get powerful insights into user behavior and adjust your website content and layout to drive more form submissions.

Optional: Set Up Advanced WordPress Form Tracking in GA4

As you’ve seen so far, there’s a lot of data you can access with the help of WPForms and MonsterInsights without even needing to visit your Google Analytics account.

This step is optional. But if you really want to dig into the statistics of your form submissions and conversion tracking, you can go to Google Analytics to get even more data about your forms. Some of the information you can find about your forms in GA4 includes:

  • Which pages drive the most form conversions
  • How many new users and existing users are submitting your forms
  • Where the user came from (such as a link from another site or a web search)

You can do all this by building a custom explore report in GA4. This will give you information similar to the User Journey addon in WPForms but with even more detail.

To get started, log into your Google Analytics account, click the Explore tab, and then the Blank report option to create a custom report.

Create custom report in GA4

Add Dimensions to Your Report

Start building your custom report by adding some “dimensions.” In GA4, dimensions are the attributes of your data that you want to measure. Click the plus (+) icon next to Dimensions to bring up the list of available dimensions.

Add dimensions to GA4 report

Search for and add the following dimensions by ticking the checkbox next to each one:

  • Event name
  • Form Id
  • Session source/medium
  • Page path + query string
  • New/established

Once you’ve added all the dimensions, click the Import button to add these dimensions to your report.

Import dimensions to GA4 report

Add Metrics to Your Report

The next step is to add the Event count metric to your report. This measures how many times a user triggered an event (such as submitting a form) in the date range you specify.

Click the plus (+) icon next to Metrics and repeat the previous steps to search for and add  the Event count metric. Click the Import button again once you have added it.

Adding the Event count metric

Build Your First Report

You now have all the dimensions and metrics you need for your report, so you can go ahead and build it.  To create a report, all you need to do is drag the dimensions you want to display from the Dimensions box into the Rows box.

To create your first report, drag Form Id and Session source/medium into the Rows box.

Building report rows

Now you have some rows for your report, you need to add some values so that GA4 can fill it with data. Scroll down in the Settings column to find the Values box and drag the Event count metric from the Metrics box there.

Adding event count to form submission report

When you drag Event count to Values, you should see your report populated with data. But right now, your report shows data for all the events on your website, not just form submissions. You need to add a filter to see only the data for form submissions.

Add a Filter to Your Report

Scroll down to the Filters box and drag Event name from the Dimensions box to Filters.

Choose exactly matches from the Filter dropdown, type generate_lead in the bottom field, and click Apply to apply the filter.

Add filter to forms submission report

You can then see all your submitted forms as a bar chart, showing where users came from to find your form (from another website, a search, Google ads, emails, or other sources.)

Form submission report showing where each user came from

Building Different Reports

You can adjust the data your reports display by dragging and dropping different dimensions into the Rows and Columns box of the form builder. Spend some time experimenting with your report to see what information you can display.

Some other reports you can build to get you started include:

  • Submissions by page: Remove Session source/medium from Rows and drag Page path + query string there instead. This will show you the page users were on when they submitted a form.
  • See if users submitting forms are new or established: Leave only Form Id in the Rows box and drag New/established to the Columns box. This will show you the breakdown of users who submitted your form so you can see how many were new and existing users.

GA4 can seem complicated, but it can give you useful information about the users on your site and how they’re finding and interacting with your forms.

Don’t worry if you’re still a bit confused about Google Analytics 4.  If you’ve followed the instructions above to set up MonsterInsights and the WPForms User Journey addon on your site, you’re already tracking form submissions and learning valuable insights about your users. You can always come back to experiment more with GA4 when you feel ready.

While on the topic of Google, did you know that in June of 2024, Google is shutting down its Business Profiles? Take a look at our article to learn what it means for users who depend on the profiles.

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Next, Track User Locations With Form Submissions

If you want to know more about the users who submit your forms, WPForms also has a Geolocation addon showing you their location. Follow our guide to using WPForms with the Geolocation addon to add the location data of users who click the submit button to your WordPress dashboard.

You can also use a Facebook pixel or a TikTok pixel to track WordPress form submissions. This will show you which users submitted a form on your site after clicking a link or ad on social media.

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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Comments

    1. Hey Peter – We currently don’t have a native feature to connect WPForms with Google Tag Manager. I do agree this would be helpful, and I’ll add this into our feature request tracker so that it’s on the radar of our developers.

      Thanks 🙂

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