Redirecting users to a 'thank you' page after they fill out a web form. Good or bad?

[SEO Lady]

Well, as usual I've been arguing with someone on Reddit.

I was advising someone how to set up simple goals, in essence, if they are noobs then just use /contact/ in GA to trigger a goal so that you know how many people have visited your contact page.

I added that you can also track a 'thank you' page [which you will be redirected to] when the webform is completed, so you can also add /thank-you/ to your GA goals.

Someone replied saying this was bad advice .. thoughts?

"Great advice, except for the suggestion of using a 'message sent successfully' page that would display after the 'contact us' page inquiry form has been filled in.

Actually, the best way to do this should you want to see exactly how many people click on your "Contact" page as opposed to sending you an online inquiry, simply count the no. of emails you receive vs the no. of page views you get on your 'contact' page.

Otherwise, you're just diluting valuable link juice from your 'contact' page to your 'message sent successfully' page, just to track your conversion % of your contact page (which as I've just explained, can be found based on the number of incoming email inquiries).

Additionally, your link juice that is siphoned to the 'message sent successfully' page is significantly reduced as that page will most likely be blocked by your robots.txt

So, in summary, 'message sent successfully' should be displayed as an on-screen popup on your 'contact us' page versus being redirected to a new 'message sent successfully' page as the SEO benefits outweigh your need for conversion tracking data."

 

[zigojacko]

I read that four times and I've got no idea what they are on about...

 

[Ewan Kennedy]

I don't think it's very useful to set up a goal for contact page visits because they don't represent conversions. You really want to be tracking forms successfully submitted.

And I wouldn't worry about losing link juice because the impact in this context would be trivial.

I do not agree that 'counting emails' is a good solution because it means doing something manually and losing the trail of data in Google Analytics. To understand conversion data at scale means automating.

I would recommend using GTM (Google Tag Manager) because that's best practice these days. Also, once set up, GTM allows you easily to track other Google Analytics events such as clicks on telephone numbers, clicks on email links etc. For some businesses, the majority of leads arrive from clicks-to-call from mobiles so in those case tracking just contact forms would result in missing the majority of goals or conversions.

Getting conversion data as complete and as accurate as possible is fundamentally important and should not be sacrificed for fear of losing link juice. That would be getting the priorities the wrong way round.

 

[SEO Lady]

Something something your internal linking will be damaged I think is what he/she meant.

Another person commented:
Ya, remember an alternative is to use AJAX and count the conversions without requiring a "message sent" page

Getting conversion data as complete and as accurate as possible is fundamentally important and should not be sacrificed for fear of losing link juice. That would be getting the priorities the wrong way round.

- Nailed it @Ewan Kennedy

 

[Paul Carmen]

Link juice to what?

They are talking absolute rot, you don't have a link on the contact page to the thankyou page, the thankyou page should be noindex/nofollow, blocked by robots.txt, as you definitely don't want it indexed (otherwise your conversion metrics will be wrong).

The contact page should be linked to via internal links/menu/buttons etc, no need to link to the thankyou page anywhere on the site, the redirect is handled by the form submission anyway and could potentially be set to nofollow...

 

[fisicx]

Keep ‘em on the page. A bit of Ajax will remove the form and replace it with the thank you message. The thank you message can be personalised and the email contain tracking info. If your contact form can’t do this get rid of it.

 

[Paul Norman]

Keep ‘em on the page. A bit of Ajax will remove the form and replace it with the thank you message. The thank you message can be personalised and the email contain tracking info. If your contact form can’t do this get rid of it.

I am sure you are correct.

But most importantly, this is one of only two posts in this thread I managed to glean any information from at all!

 

[Paul Carmen]

Keep ‘em on the page. A bit of Ajax will remove the form and replace it with the thank you message. The thank you message can be personalised and the email contain tracking info. If your contact form can’t do this get rid of it.

While its a neat solution, for anyone that generates a lot of leads via forms/funnels/quizzes its not a great one.

The reason being, you're not trying to track email open rates, you should be doing that via your email/CRM system or by UTM tracking in Google Analytics (both preferably). You're trying to track people who actually complete the contact process; e.g. the actual on site contact conversion.

While tracking code can be fired on button click, or via the code running, this isn't good for a number of reasons; e.g if this code doesn't work the button click says it has, as the click has happened, plus if you do have any errors or conversion discrepancies, this is virtually impossible to de-dupe.

If tracking contact accurately is important (for any site that gets leads via contacts), you're always better to have a thankyou page and tag all this up properly using Google Analytics (GA), Google Tag Manager etc.

With a separate page for contact and thankyou, you can see views of both pages in GA, making sure they correspond with the conversion data, plus track conversions across as many systems as needed easily (e.g. for GA, affiliates, Google/Bing PPC ads etc).

 

[fisicx]

That may be so, but from a usability point of view taking me to a new page on completion is annoying.

With regards tracking, what I meant was you add the Page details/IP etc to the email you get not the one you send to the applicant.

And I stopped using GA years ago. Clicky works so much better for me, especially the granularity. Far better than GA.

 

[Paul Carmen]

@fisicx, ah, I see what you mean, I can also see why that works for you.

We have customers who we generate hundreds of leads a day for, so relying on an email would be a very bad idea, I suspect the tracking would only work if they opened the email (they don't, its a fail safe, as the leads go straight into a contact management system).

Even doing so for some of our smaller sites adds a manual step and removes the option to easily de-dupe quickly, or track automatically in CRMs, the tracking has to be on site to be reliable.

Plus, while you don't use GA, the vast majority of the world does, and its the only game in town if you want your data to flow seamlessly across Ads, GA, Search Console, Data Studio and track leads from other sources automatically using industry standard UTM tracking...

 

[Deleted member 333097]

This seems to be a comment about internal linking... this level of micro-optimisation where it's a website where the internal staff do not know how to set up GA goals... ultimately is not worth the candle... they should put their attention elsewhere like generating business!

 

[Aleksander_Gramm]

I think reddit is a place for teenagers, this is all I can say about that.

Also, when I see something like 'a link juice' the time has come to stop having any discussion. It seems arrogant but such discussion won't be worth a time.

 

[Kevin Joseph]

It's completely fine. Just make sure you've blocked the thank you page from crawlers by way of a no-index/robots.txt.

This will also help with tracking

 

[Alan]

If you are using javascript ( via ajax or fetch ) to keep them on page then simply trigger a GA Event on success and use GA to map the Event to a goal.

 

[Sanjay Patoliya]

You can set a form fill up event in GA in case you don't want to set a thank you page. But I think it won't affect your user or website to redirect to the thank you page after submitting an online inquiry.

 

[computerbeing]

Can see no disadvantage in having a thank you page. It also gives reassurance to visitors that the form submission worked.

 

[Larry Fong]

It may the conversion tracking easier. Or otherwise, you may need a bit more steps to track the button action.

 

[richwrite]

‘Thank you pages’ are extremely helpful when it comes to keeping track of your goals submission. You can always check the landing page where the users submit the form and redirects to thank you page. It’s a great idea to measure the behaviour flow of users of your website.

Thank you pages usually are low-content pages with upselling and social sharing options, but they're of no interest to anyone looking for information on Google. So you can add noindex tag to them so that they won’t come in search result pages.