This article continues from How to report on your lead generation form and shows how to use Google Analytics to measure lead-generation form submissions as conversions.
Understand conversions
Whenever someone performs an action that's meaningful to your business, you can measure the action as a conversion. In this case, customers filling out the lead-generation form is an important, meaningful action to the business that you could measure as a conversion.
By measuring the form submissions as a conversion, you will be able see the different paths users take before filling out the form, unlock new metrics (or data points) in Google Analytics (for example, the conversion rate), and advertise to people who filled out the form or didn't fill out the form.
Measure lead form submissions
You can measure any action as a conversion so long as you have an event for the action. For example, to measure when someone submits the lead-generation form as a conversion, you need to create an event for when someone fills out the form.
Earlier in this series, you learned about some of the events that Google Analytics collects from your website automatically when you set up the measurement code on your website.
However, while Google Analytics measures form submissions in general automatically, you need an event for when someone submits the specific form you've created, rather than measuring all form submissions as conversions. Then you need to mark that new event as a conversion.
Create the event
Google Analytics measures when someone submits any form using the form_submit event. To create an event for when someone submits the specific form, go to Google Analytics and click Admin on the left.
You will see Events in the list of options under Data display. The Events page also allows you to create and modify events. (Note that you can also create and modify events through measurement code or by making some changes in Google Tag Manager, but for this tutorial, we'll use the Events page.)
Since you only want to measure when someone submits the new form, you need to create an event that copies the form_submit event and then narrow the new event to just measure when someone submits the form.
To create the event:
- On the Events page, click Create event and then Create on the top right.
- In the Custom event name field, enter "lead_form_submit".
- In the Match conditions field, enter the condition "event_name equals form_submit".
- Click Add condition.
- Enter the condition "form_name equals lead-form".
This value comes from the HTML name attribute of the <form> DOM element.
- Click Create on the top right.
The new event will appear in the list of events on the Events page when you start to collect data for the event. The event will only be sent to Google Analytics when a form is submitted with the name "lead-form".
Mark the event as conversions
You now need to measure the event as a conversion. All you need to do to measure an event as a conversion is to toggle the conversion option on for the event. Since the event is new, Google Analytics doesn't have data for the event, so you need to preemptively mark the event as a conversion.
To preemptively mark the event as a conversion:
- Go back to Admin and now click Conversions under Data display.
- In the Conversion events tab, click New conversion event.
- Enter the name of the new event, "lead_form_submit".
- Click Save.
Google Analytics now knows to treat the new event as a conversion when it receives the event.
See the event in reports
The Realtime report is available in the Reports section, and it shows you what users are doing on your website as they browse your website. The Event count by Event name card in the report shows you the events that Google Analytics has collected in the last 30 minutes from your website.
When someone submits the form, you should now see the lead_form_submit event in the Event count by Event name card. You should also see the event in the Conversions by Event name card in the same report.
If you don't see the event, you might need to wait a little longer for Google to process the event, or review the previous steps to make sure you set up the event correctly.
Once Analytics processes your events as conversions, you can use reports and explorations to further investigate your conversion data. We will talk more about the reports in the coming articles, but you can learn more about the reports in Report on conversions.