Capture form submission context

Form submission context is the information about how someone arrived at your form: which campaign brought them, which channel they came through, which page they submitted from, and what was known about them at the time. Switching it on stores that alongside each response.

There are two reasons to want it. It tells you where your responses are coming from, and it is what allows a form to be tracked in a campaign.

In the form's settings, look for Capture form submission context, described as Store attribution and personalisation data with form responses, enabling campaign performance reporting.

The toggle beneath it is Enable form submission context.

You need permission to update the form to see or change it.

Forms created from now on have context capture switched on. You do not need to do anything.

Forms that already existed do not. The setting arrived after they were built, and switching it on for them is a deliberate choice rather than something applied retrospectively.

This is the single most common reason a form cannot be added to a campaign. The form picker in Add form tracking only lists forms with capture enabled, so an older form is absent from it altogether. If you are looking for a form you know exists and cannot find it, this is almost certainly why. See Track a form in a campaign.

1. Open the form and go to its settings.
2. Find Capture form submission context.
3. Switch Enable form submission context on or off.
4. Save the form.

Context is stored per response, and only what was available at the time. Seventeen fields in four groups:

Nothing here is required for a form to work. If somebody arrives directly, with no campaign tagging on the link, most of these have nothing to record and are stored empty. The response is accepted as normal and no errors are shown. Capture never stands between a visitor and submitting your form.

To see what was captured on a particular response, open it and select the Context tab. See View context in a form response.

Switching the setting off stops context being captured on responses submitted from that point. Responses already collected keep everything that was stored with them, because switching off is not retrospective.

If a campaign is already tracking the form, its tracking card stays where it is. Responses collected while capture was on still carry their context, so they still count.

What stops is growth. New responses arrive without context, so nothing matches them to the campaign and the count stops rising. In effect the card freezes at the number it had reached.

If you are switching capture off for privacy reasons on a form that a live campaign depends on, tell whoever owns that campaign. Their reporting will stop moving and nothing on their screen will explain it.

Context includes information about the visitor, including their country and identifiers set by advertising platforms. Two points are worth knowing:

• Context is deleted along with its response. If you delete a response, the context goes with it, so there is no separate cleanup step for an erasure request
• Context cannot be removed on its own. There is no way to strip context from a response you want to keep

If you have a form where the answers matter but the attribution data is unwelcome, the option is to leave capture switched off rather than to remove it afterwards.