Capture Referral URL in Gravity Forms

The best way to capture the referral URL of your Gravity Forms submissions on your WordPress website is by using our AFL UTM Tracker plugin. The plugin works primarily as a UTM tracking solution but also tracks the first website referrer URL.

The referral URL is the URL of the site that the visitor came from before landing on your website. For example, when a visitor searches for your website on Google and click on the search result. The browser will pass the Referral URL value to your website. The Referral URL from Google will be:

https://www.google.com/

It is important to digital marketers because the Referral URL tells you where your visitors first originate from before submitting your lead generation or contact form and henceforth you can see if your marketing efforts are contributing to your sales.

Steps

1. Install our AFL UTM Tracker plugin into your WordPress website.
2. Clear all page cache so that the Javascript tracking file is loaded for the first time.
3. To simulate a new visitor for testing, launch your web browser in private-browsing mode or Incognite-mode.
4. Go to Google and search for your website or article.
5. Click the search result to your website.
6. Navigate around your site.
7. Go to your contact form page.
8. Submit form.

Next, we want to view the Referral URL value in the WordPress admin.

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to your Gravity Forms > Form.
3. View the form submission which you have just submitted.
4. On the side bar, your will see the AFL UTM Tracker meta box.
5. Look for the “First Website Referrer” field.

AFL UTM Tracker vs Gravity Forms {referer} merge tag

Here is a comparison between the referral URL from our AFL UTM Tracker plugin versus the in-built {referer} merge tag directly from Gravity Forms.

Feature	AFL UTM Tracker	Gravity Forms {referer}
Source of Referral URL	document.referrer	$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’]
Remembers First Referral URL across pages	Yes (uses cookies)	No
Fast Setup	Yes (no setup needed)	No (require hidden field)
Works with page caching	Yes	No

From the table, you can see that our AFL UTM Tracker plugin will provide a better solution for real-world conversion tracking because it actually remembers the first ever website URL that brought in your visitor. Without cookies, the referral URL will always be the URL of the previous page which may be even your own page as the visitor navigates around your site.