Track and monitor web form submissions

ShEpSy · November 16, 2012, 7:35am

Hi,

Just wondering what the best way is to monitor web form submissions/enquires on a site? I have created a site for a client and they have a contact us form that emails them each time an enquiry is made on their website. Is there anyway I can track these enquiries using analytics or via another way?

Thanks,
Shepsy

ralphm · November 16, 2012, 7:42am

You could have an email also sent to yourself, but you should get permission from the site owner first, of course. Why do you need to track them?

ShEpSy · November 16, 2012, 9:36am

It’s a site I done for a friend but I’m just curious to see the enquiries in relation to any SEO changes I make.

Mikl · November 16, 2012, 9:39am

[FONT=verdana]Shepsy, the answer depends in part on exactly what information you need to track. The emails already contain the sender’s name, their email address, the date and time of their enquiry, and the subject. If you want to know which part of your site the enquiry originated from, you could add a suitable code to the message header or body to indicate that (you would do that at the time that the message is generated).

If you want to do some sort of analytics on the messages, one option would be to write some simple software (or hire someone to do it for you) to extract those details from the emails and insert them into an Excel spreadsheet. You could then use all the features of Excel to extract whatever useful information you need.

If that doesn’t answer your question, perhaps you could be more specific about what you are trying to achieve.

Mike
[/FONT]

ShEpSy · November 23, 2012, 5:12am

Mikl:

[FONT=verdana]Shepsy, the answer depends in part on exactly what information you need to track. The emails already contain the sender’s name, their email address, the date and time of their enquiry, and the subject. If you want to know which part of your site the enquiry originated from, you could add a suitable code to the message header or body to indicate that (you would do that at the time that the message is generated).

If you want to do some sort of analytics on the messages, one option would be to write some simple software (or hire someone to do it for you) to extract those details from the emails and insert them into an Excel spreadsheet. You could then use all the features of Excel to extract whatever useful information you need.

If that doesn’t answer your question, perhaps you could be more specific about what you are trying to achieve.

Mike
[/FONT]

I am only after a figure as to how many times the form has been submitted? E.g. on a weekly / month basis to be able to see how times a form enquiry was made by customers?

I don’t need to do any analytics or anything with the messages.

Thanks.

Mikl · November 23, 2012, 8:42am

[FONT=verdana]

I am only after a figure as to how many times the form has been submitted?

What logic are you using to actually process the enquiry? Does the form call a script on the server that sends an email to the site owner? If so, do you know how to modify the script? If so, you could modify it so that it adds a record to a MySQL database table with the date and time of each enquiry. Then it’s just a matter of doing a SQL query to count the number of records per day or per month or whatever.

If that sounds too complicated, you could add a row to a text file, rather than updating a database. Or you could do as Ralph suggested, and send an email to yourself, and then count the number of those emails at the end of the month.

Mike[/FONT]