Lots of Higher Education institutions use GeckoEngage to handle a core component of their student acquisition tech stack – namely their online forms (+ a lot more).
Despite its popularity, GeckoEngage don’t offer support for tracking form submissions within Google Analytics. The official documentation suggests tracking the clicks on the submit buttons (sigh). As a leading performance marketing agency, such an inaccurate measure of performance simply won’t do – imagine how many times the button is clicked when the form isn’t successfully submitted.
We created the solution to allow you to track embedded GeckoEngage form completions within Google Analytics. What’s more, you can implement it entirely via Google Tag Manager – so there’s no need to get your developers involved!
So here’s how to do it…
Firstly, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got Google Tag Managed installed on the embedded form itself. That’s done within the GeckoEngage platform:
Once that’s done it will enable us to fire a tag that can listen to the embedded form and create a dataLayer event when the form is successfully submitted.
To do that, copy and paste our HTML listener code into a new Custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager:
Trigger this tag to fire whenever the DOM is loaded:
Now we have dataLayer events firing whenever the embedded GeckoEngage forms submit successfully (NB if any errors, or if you’ve got forms setup to present anything other than the main success message e.g. if an event registration is already closed this will not work) we can create Tags to send this data to Google Analytics. We’d recommend using GA Events for this as they’re ever so slightly more robust than creating virtual pageviews.
The Custom HTML listener above will send a dataLayer event named GeckoFormSuccess with a variable called GeckoFormName with a value equal to the name you’ve given your Form within GeckoEngage. That way you can install this once, and it should work on all embedded GeckoEngage forms without any additional setup necessary.
To be able to use the ‘GeckoFormName’ value in our Google Analytics tag, we need to create a GTM variable for it:
Next, we need to create a Trigger based off the dataLayer event that’s being created by our Custom HTML listener tag:
Now we can create the Tag to send data into Google Analytics using this dataLayer Variable as the value for Label so that we can report on the different forms within GA:
N.B. As the embedded form is technically still on the GeckoEngage domain, you’ll need to ensure you have Cross Domain tracking setup – treating the embedded form as a separate domain. You can also set the hostname in your Event tag to mask its true hostname and tell GA that it’s coming from your own website.