What Can You Learn from Gravity Form Logs?

Here’s a short follow-up to our previous post about troubleshooting form submission discrepancies.

Video Transcript

David: So, you found something regarding a conversation we had last week about gravity forms.

Dave: Yeah. Last week, the discussion was we’ve got 50 submissions (50 button clicks) to a gravity form on a site. But then, when we looked at the thank you page, we had 40-something. So why is there a 10 or 20% failure rate, potentially, of somebody clicking a button and submitting a form? Well, we all know that on a gravity form, contact form, or whatever it is, you can have some fields that are required, and that might be the reason somebody has to refill it. Is that it, or is there some other reason? And so, once it starts being in those kinds of numbers, it might be worthwhile taking a look at why somebody is not able to submit. What is the error that they’re getting? And so I was looking at gravity forms, and you can establish logging to it. You can log multiple things, you can log the core functions, and you can log add-ons, but apparently, if somebody skips a field or puts the wrong information in or something, gravity forms will log it as some type of validation error. So, you could actually see what those errors are in the log. So, there is a way to figure out what’s going on.

David: Right.

Dave: Now, practically, I’m thinking about the way I would do it. I would say whatever the timeframe is, a month, and you get the 50 submissions. I would probably extract my gravity form log that shows those validation errors and throw it in the ChatGPT or something like that, then filter it through it and see if there’s anything that’s common.

David: For instance, people don’t want to leave their phone numbers, and that’s why most of them are rejected.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. It’s like, for three out of the five, you had to force them to put their phone number in.

David: Or, God forbid, the email validation script is not working correctly, and people are adding a valid email. It just doesn’t happen to work.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I’m thinking this is something that I would like to do, of course, if I have time because there could be something that’s very fundamental about how we do our forms that leads people to not be able to fill them out or they have the error.

David: Yeah.

Dave: We talked about using Google Analytics for data. This is a good way to actually use data to say, “Look, client, you want to put this phone number in this form as required, but do you absolutely have to have it? Because I’ve got data from other sites that say 10% of the people have problems filling it out because of that. Do you absolutely need it?”

David: Or, even better, “We added the phone number you asked for. We noticed conversions went down. Here’s the data showing that the reason why is people don’t want to give a phone number.”

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

David: Right? Because sometimes we talk about conversion rates. What I like to do is what I call poor man’s conversion rate optimization, which is run something for a month and compare the data for that month to the previous month.

Dave: Exactly.

David: Alright, well, what if we were to add the phone number? What would happen?

Dave: What if we take it away?

David: What if we take it away? What would happen? Oh, we got more? Oh, and they’re still quality. Oh, alright, done. But to have data like that, I think that it’s probably because gravity forms in a lot of these form plugins will insert a validation error on the page. Please enter a phone number or something like that. I think there’s probably a way within Google Tag Manager to listen for that and then add an event in Google Analytics saying this was missing.

Dave: I’m sure there’s a way to do it. But do we want to spend that time figuring it out? Do gravity forms ever change the message, or do you want to change the message? That might make it a little bit more difficult because you actually have to look at the real message as well.

David: Right, right. Well, I think if you could put it into an event in Google Analytics, you could build an exploration funnel to show where people drop off in Google Analytics.

Dave: Yeah. Now, the one thing to be careful of, though, is when you do this kind of logging, it can fill up your server a little bit so that the logs can get pretty big. So, you just have to be careful how much you do it and to watch for it. You probably don’t want to keep these kinds of logs forever, and that would be the advantage of doing it in Google Analytics because then you could keep it for the long term.

David: Right.

Dave: It would be kind of nice to do that because we have a site where we’ve had a drop-off in quote forms. So, when I ask what’s going on? The client says, “Well, sales are normally down, so it doesn’t surprise us.” But with us doing SEO on it, I don’t know if that’s the real problem, and we just don’t know yet. But I did find out that, for example, the traffic to the quote page is the same as it was in the past. So, what’s going on? There’s something about people visiting it and not filling it in. I’m not getting what’s going on. I don’t know yet.

David: Well, yeah, that brings me back to a basic Google Analytics exploration where you can do the funnel exploration. Remember, what we have with Google Analytics is certain enhanced events that happen when we turn on the advanced events feature. So, we could have this first step in the funnel, viewing the contact page. The second step could be form start event, which is a default event in Google Analytics. Meaning they started to fill out the form. Then, form submit, which means they tried to submit the form whether or not it’s valid, and then confirmation of the valid submission, which, in my recommendation, is always a confirmation page or whatever. You could watch people drop off and then you could have that as an exploration in Google Analytics to show clients this month, or let’s say after we make a change on the form, here’s what we’ve noticed. Just have that exploration together and reuse it as necessary to show the potential drop-offs along the way.

Dave: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And it seems like for us, building websites for people, assuming that’s what we do, we should do that and make sure you can explore everything regarding as much as possible that click to calls.

David: That was the thing I was going to add because sometimes our phone number is on our confirmation page, and it might be that more people are calling rather than filling out the form. So, you need to account for that.

Dave: Yeah, that’s true. So, you obviously need to drill down, but then you almost need a higher level or holistic approach to say the leads, whatever ways they come in, because it could be contact form, click to call, quote form, all those different kinds of things.

David: Right. Very, very interesting.