How do you track goals in GA when there's a URL switch?

[jono1980]

I have a client with a fairly simple site. One of the goals I am trying to set up in GA is to track the number of times the contact form is submitted.

This seems fairly simple - the Goal URL is: www.example.com/contact-us/?

The first step in the goal funnel is simply: www.example.com/contact-us.

The GA tracking code appears on both of these pages, and yet conversions are not being recorded. Between these two steps there is a URL switch when the contact form is logged into SalesForce. There is no tracking code here and this URL is not accounted for in the conversion funnel.

Is this be the reason the conversions are not being counted? And if so, is there a work-around?

Thanks.

[incrediblehelp]

Do you have a thank you page for the contact us form?

[Skardhamar]

How has your setup your goal exactly? (If you by accident marked the goal-steps as a regular expression and didnt escape the ?, the goal wouldnt work)

[jono1980]

Hi everyone, thanks for your help. Unfortunately the problem is persisting.

incrediblehelp - No, there is not a thank-you page for the contact form - the URL simply changes from /contact-us/ to /contact-us/?

skardhamar - I've defined the steps in the goal like this:

Goal URL: /contact-us/?
Goal Funnel - Step 1: /contact-us/

Should it be different?

Thank you.

[Skardhamar]

What type of goal have you chosen? Is it Head Match, Exact Match or Regular Expression?

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I´d recommend you to chose Regular Expression and setup the goal like this:

Goal URL: ^/contact-us/\?$
Goal Funnel - Step 1: ^/contact-us/$

Maybe the problem is that ga doesnt see a different between /? and /.

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If this doesnt work you could always just force a pagetrack on the input-button.

[jono1980]

Thanks Skardhamar, I will give that a try and see if it works.

[BradleyT]

Why not just set up /contact-us/thank-you.html and make things easy for everyone?

[jono1980]

Very practical suggestion BradleyT :) And one that I have proposed to the client. But I'm not handling the development.

The site is exactly as it was before (it's just been moved to WordPress which is the only change) and this goal was working previously so I can not understand what the problem is.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

[Skardhamar]

Did you try to setup the goal as I proposed?

[Yoshimi]

There is a code that you can use to track GA between different URL's, you add a code snippet to the link, then add code to the external site to tell GA that you want to track visits to that page too; is this something that you are able to do?

more info here [google.com...]

[jono1980]

Skardhamar - thanks. I tried that, but it doesn't seem to work either. cheers for your help though.

Yoshimi - thanks for the suggestion, I am going to look into that futher now.

[Philosopher]

Maybe the problem is that ga doesnt see a different between /? and /.

Almost certainly the problem. I just ran into this with a client's site. The contact form posted to itself so I tried to differentiate the two URLs for the purpose of defining the goal by tacking on a ? to the action. While the browser shows the URL with the ? tacked on, GA does not. If you pull up the top content report, it shows no hits to the ? version even though there have been conversions.

Can you add some extra info to the URL? possibly instead of it returning to /contact-us/? it could return to /contact-us/?status=done

It worked in my case.

[jono1980]

philosopher - Excellent advice. And thanks for the tip.

I've tried escaping the "?" and it doesn't work either.

The case you describe is exactly the same as this, in that the contact form is posting to itself. I think the only way forward is going to be insisting that the developer create an alternative /thank-you page or, as you've suggested, a /?status=done