Capturing Conversion Time

It can often be useful to understand how long it takes people to convert on your website (I.e. the time between their first visit and when they complete a form on your website).

In this article, we’ll show you how to capture conversion time (which is measured in days) using Attributer.

How to capture conversion time using Attributer

Capturing the conversion time and sending it through to your CRM is easy with Attributer. All you need to do is add a ‘Conversion Days’ field to your forms.

The process to do this will differ depending on the form tool you are using, but it will be the same as the process you went through to add the Channel & Channel Drilldown fields (if you can’t remember, instructions for adding those can be found here)

The default value or field name you need to add is as follows:

• Default Value (used in Gravity Forms, WPForms & more) = [conversiondays]
• Field Name (used in Wix, Zoho Forms & more) = conversiondays

How conversion time is calculated

In short, conversion time is measured in ‘days’, and a day is calculated as a 24-hour period from their first visit. Let’s illustrate with some examples:

Example 1

A visitor first comes to your website at 9am on Monday 1st August but leaves without completing a form. They then come back on Thursday 4th August at 10am and complete your contact form. Attributer would pass through ‘3’ in the conversion time field as it was 3x full 24-hour periods between their first visit and when they submitted the form.

Example 2

A visitor first comes to your website at 1pm on Monday 1st August but leaves without completing a form. They then come back on Thursday 4th August at 10am and complete your contact form. Attributer would pass through ‘2’ in the conversion time field as only 2x full 24-hour periods had passed between their first visit and when they submitted the form (the visit on Thursday was at 10am whereas the original visit on Monday was at 1pm, so the 3rd 24-hour period had not yet passed).

Important note on using this data

Technically speaking, Attributer stores the timestamp of the visitor’s first visit to your website. Then, when they complete a form on your site, it calculates the number of days (i.e. 24-hour periods) between the first visit and the current date and time. It then passes that through as a number of days (I.e. 3)

This means that if a visitor was to complete multiple forms on your website over a period of days, this number could be different each time. For the vast majority of our customers, this is fine because people don’t usually submit your ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Request A Quote’ forms multiple times on different days.

However, if you believe your visitors will submit multiple forms on your website over different days, then you will need to handle this accordingly. For instance, if you are using a CRM system then you may want to have a rule where the number in the Conversion Time field cannot be overwritten once initially set. This will prevent it from being updated with a new number when a visitor submits another form, and will preserve the original information on how many days it took this visitor to become a lead.