Partial responses, save and continue later and Google Tag Manager

Long forms lose people along the way. The Tracking and partial responses card has three features for that: keep what the person filled in even without submitting, let the person save and come back later, and send the form's steps to your Google Tag Manager. Clínica Vitta's intake form, in Miami, has 30 questions: many patients start on their phone during the commute and finish at home.

The card is in Forms › (form) › Edit › "Tracking and partial responses" card. Everything takes effect as soon as you click Save tracking, without publishing again.

Keep partial responses

With Keep partial responses on, the form keeps what the person has already filled in, even if they close the page without submitting. Saving happens each time they leave a filled-in field.

What is kept:

• the answers to the fields they filled in, as they were, even if incomplete: a half-typed email is kept half-typed;
• the last field they filled in (Stopped at);
• city, state and country, device, browser and system.

What is never kept: signatures, hidden fields and questions hidden by logic.

Respondents are told. At the top of the first step, the line "What you fill in may be saved before you submit." appears.

A partial lasts 30 days from the last edit and disappears earlier if the person submits the form: it then becomes a regular response.

The "Partials" view

In Forms › (form) › Responses, click Partials. The table shows Last edit, the questions and Stopped at. In View response, the drawer shows the answers and the Who filled it in block: started at, last edit, stopped at, location, device, browser and operating system.

At Vitta, the front desk opens Partials every morning. A patient stopped at "Current medications" but had already left her name and phone: the front desk calls, clears up the question and sends the link again.

• Partials have no status, tags, note, trash or export.
• Delete partial deletes it permanently, without going to the trash. Only the account Owner sees that button.
• With the feature off, the view shows the notice "Partial responses are off" and nothing new is kept.

Allow saving to continue later

With Allow saving to continue later on, the form gets a Save and continue later button next to the submit button. The person decides when to save:

1. They click Save and continue later. At least one field must be filled in.
2. The Link to continue appears, with a Copy link button. Nothing is emailed and nothing is stored in the browser: they need to copy the link and keep it.
3. When they open the link, the form comes back filled in, at the step where they stopped, with the notice "You are back where you left off."

Link rules:

• Valid for 30 days from the last save. Saving again keeps the same link and renews the period.
• Anyone with the link sees what was filled in. The form itself tells the person not to share it.
• Signatures are not saved: the person signs when they come back, and the form says so when there is a signature field.
• The parameters of the original link (campaign, invite and hidden fields) carry over to the resume link.
• Only what still fits the currently published version comes back: if you removed a question or option in the meantime, that answer does not come back.
• After the person submits, the link stops working. An expired or used link opens a blank form with the notice "This link to continue is no longer valid."
• In kiosk mode the button does not appear: on the front-desk tablet, the next person would see the link with the previous person's answers.
• For a form embedded in your site, the resume link opens the form on its own page, outside your site.

The two features are independent. What a person saves to continue later only shows to you under Partials if Keep partial responses is also on.

Google Tag Manager ID

If you use Google Tag Manager, paste your container ID (in the format GTM-XXXXXXX) in Google Tag Manager ID. The form loads your container and sends four events to the dataLayer, each with the form's identifier (form_id):

• form_view — the form opened;
• form_start — the person touched the first field;
• field_complete — the person left a filled-in field, with the field's identifier (field_id), once per field;
• form_submit — the response was submitted.

What the person typed is never in the events. With a custom event trigger on form_submit in your container, Vitta records campaign conversions in Google Ads and Meta. If the form is embedded in your site, the page embedding it also receives these events.

Where to go next

• Organizing responses: status, tags, notes and trash (Responses collection) — the Responses tab and the trash.
• Funnel, conversion and drop-off by field (Analytics collection) — which question people stop at, in numbers.
• Kiosk mode (Appearance and after submission collection) — the tablet that restarts on its own for the next person.
• Embed the form on your website (Share collection) — the form inside your page.

In short: partial responses keep for 30 days what a person filled in without submitting (never signatures, hidden fields or hidden questions), with a notice to respondents and the Partials view for you; "save and continue later" gives the person a 30-day link to come back where they left off, outside kiosk mode; and the Google Tag Manager ID receives form_view, form_start, field_complete and form_submit, never what was typed.