Capturing Number of Visits

It can often be useful to understand how many times someone visits your website before completing a form and becoming a lead.

So in this article, we’ll show you how to use Attributer to capture this information and send it to your CRM and other tools.

How to capture number of visits using Attributer

Capturing the number of visits and sending it through to your CRM is easy with Attributer. All you need to do is add a ‘Visits’ 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) = [visits]
• Field Name (used in Wix, Zoho Forms & more) = visits

How visits are calculated

Attributer defines a visit based on user activity within a given timeframe. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

• A visit starts when someone lands on your website
• It continues as long as the user remains active on your website
• It ends after 30 minutes of inactivity

Let’s have a look at a few examples:

Example 1

A visitor first comes to your website at 9am on Monday 1st August. They navigate around your website for a few minutes and then leave. They then come back at 1pm on the same day and complete a form on your website. Attributer would pass through ‘2’ in the visits field as the first visit ended 30 minutes after they stopped interacting with your website. Then, when they came back at 1pm, this was counted as a 2nd visit.

Example 2

A visitor first comes to your website at 9am on Monday 1st August and browses around for a short period. They then leave their computer for 5 minutes to go make a coffee. When they come back, they browse a few more pages on your website and complete your Contact Us form. Attributer would pass through ‘1’ in the visits field as there was not enough inactive time (i.e. there was only 5 minutes of inactivity) for the original visit to be counted as completed.

Important note on using this data

Technically speaking, Attributer stores the timestamp of the visitor’s last page load. Then, when a new page load occurs it checks the difference between the current time and the last page load. If that is more than 30 minutes, then a new visit is counted. Eventually, when the visitor submits a form, the number of visits that have been counted is written into the hidden field (I.e. 4)

This means that if a visitor was to complete multiple forms on your website over a number of different visits your website, this number could be different with each form submission. 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 across different website visits.

However, if you believe your visitors will submit multiple forms on your website over different visits, 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 Visits 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 visits it took for them to complete a form and become a lead.