Great marketers are always testing different channels to measure a campaign's effectiveness for an intended audience. As you use Act-On Forms to do things like generating leads for your sales team, you may have questions about your form submissions, like "How did this contact find our form?". Tracking this can help attribute revenue to specific marketing efforts and show the true value of your campaigns.
When a contact submits an Act-On form, Act-On automatically collects this data, including Referrer URL, Search term, and Campaign name. You can use these fields for segmentation and reporting in Act-On. You can also send this data to a third-party such as your CRM, a Zapier webhook, or an external form post.
Data Fields that Track Sources
These fields are collected and stored in your Form Submission List. Your Website Prospector report also includes the referring sites and search terms associated with each form and landing page.
| Field Name | Field Description |
| _REFERRER_ | The raw URL used to refer a visitor to your form |
| _SEARCH_ | The search term used by the visitor |
| _CAMPAIGN_ |
The campaign name assigned to a particular URL If you use an ActOn Landing Page to host your form, you can generate multiple public URLs to track unique traffic sources to your form. When you do this, the _CAMPAIGN_ field will display a value distinguishing campaigns by their associated URL. For example, creating a URL named "Adwords" will populate the _CAMPAIGN_ field with that value when a contact access the landing page from that URL. |
Sending Visitor Information with Form Post Data
Suppose your form is sending leads to your CRM, or you are sending the data externally in some other way (e.g. Zapier webhook, or an external form post). You can also pass the Referring URL, search terms, and Campaign name by updating your form to include hidden fields.
First, you will need to set up your CRM or external form to accept the new fields:
- If the form data is going to your CRM, you will need to identify existing fields, or create new custom fields, for each form data field you want to capture. Ask your CRM Administrator for assistance.
- If the form data is going to an external form, that form will need each field to capture the data as well.
Once that is done, set up your Act-On form to send the values:
- Create a new form or edit an existing form
- Insert a Hidden Field
- Enter a Field Name and Column Name to capture data
- You can use "referrer", "search", and "campaign", or other field names that make sense to you and match the data fields in your CRM / Form / Zapier webhook / etc.
- In the Static Value field, enter the variable for the field you are collecting:
- To capture Referrer:
{{_REFERRER}} - To capture Search:
{{_SEARCH}} - To capture Campaign:
{{_CAMPAIGN}}
- To capture Referrer:
- Repeat to create a new hidden field for each field you want to capture
- To capture all three fields, create three hidden fields. See the example below.
- Click Save
- Test your form to make sure data is collected as expected
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