Improve Your Content Marketing with Contact Form 7 Conversion Tracking

Leverage Contact Form 7 conversion tracking to uncover what content and keywords truly get results.

Marketers can be misled by their own Google Analytics data. If you stick to out-of-the-box metrics like page views, you could be wasting time on content and keywords that don’t ultimately convert. Measuring vital conversions, like form submissions, is key to understanding what content marketing is most effective at generating ROI.

The CF7 Intelligence plugin makes Contact Form 7 conversion tracking easy without javascript or Google Tag Manager experience. In this video, we will demonstrate how to use conversion analytics to identify the content that truly produces the most business value.

Video transcript (edited)

I created a WordPress site for the fictitious Smarter Agency, a company that sells web design and marketing. Their goal is to increase leads generated from their site. In this video, we’re just going to focus on the newsletter signup form and the quote request form.

Track all important form submissions with Google Analytics Goals

In order to track conversions, you need to associate each of your forms with a goal.

Start by installing the Contact Form 7 Google Analytics Intelligence Plugin. Once installed, all your forms will automatically start triggering events in Google Analytics.

Now we need to create form-specific goals to associate with each of these events. To create a goal in WordPress, click Contact in the sidebar menu, hit Edit under the form you’d like to create a goal for, switch to the intelligence tab at the top and click +Add goal. After the goal is created, select it from the drop-down menu under Submission event/goal and save.

Here I created the “Newsletter Signup” goal for newsletter form submissions and the “Sales Inquiry” goal for quote request form submissions. These new goals will now appear in the conversions report under the Real-Time tab in Google Analytics. To test it, just fill out and submit one of the forms.

Turn conversion tracking analytics into actionable data

Standard analytics only show page views. Without conversion tracking, all we would see is that blog post A generates 2x more views than blog posts B and C. That means “Web Design Secrets” must be the most valuable phrase of the three, right? Not necessarily.

Blog post A produces the most traffic but generates zero conversions. This could indicate a disconnect between the phrasing and what the site actually offers. Blog posts B and C generate less traffic, but they both produce 20% conversion ratios.

While page views are useful, they offer little more than vanity metrics. Drawing conclusions based solely off of out-of-the-box analytics could lead you to utilize content and keywords that may increase site traffic but hurt your conversion ratios. These insights are useful in determining which of your marketing efforts work best.

Add more weight to goals that have more business value

Not all conversions are equal, though. Some form submissions are more likely to create revenue than others. In this case, we believe that sales inquiries are more valuable than newsletter signups, so we need to customize our analytics to reflect this. This you can do by adjusting the “weight” of each goal.

There are two ways to do this.

In your WordPress dashboard, click on Contact, switch to the Intelligence tab at the top of the page and change the submission value of each goal one-by-one.

Another way is to go to the Intelligence plugin tab > Settings > Scoring. This method allows you to set a value for one goal while referencing another.

Let’s say Smarter Agency feels that Sales Inquiries have 8x more business value than Newsletter Signups. We can change the Sales Inquiry value from the default (100) to 400, and reduce the value of Newsletter Signups to 50.

Now your analytics can more accurately reflect the true business impact that each dimension is contributing.

Don’t let your data mislead you

To see these changes in action, head back over to Google Analytics.

Access the Landing Pages Report by selecting Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Here, we can organize the goals according to weight by clicking on the Goal Value column. We can see that blog post C has a goal value of $400, blog post B $100, and blog post A has no value at all.

Acquisition and behavior metrics led us to believe that blog post A performed the best and blog post C the worst. However, we can see now that blog post C and its related keywords are actually the most effective.

Had we acted on standard analytics alone, we would have mistakenly used keywords from blog post A that could have been detrimental to our content conversions. That’s why it’s always good practice to track conversions in addition to acquisition and behavior metrics.

Summary

Without conversion tracking, your analytics are at best incomplete, and at worse misleading you.