There is no doubt that “thank you” pages provide a lot of power when it comes to tracking form submissions, conversions and up-sells. But are you setting up the pages for success?
There are 2 main types of thank you pages.
Contact form thank you page
For a contact form, you don’t really need a thank you page. Rather just a “Thank you, we will reply soon” message. A message that fits your website’s tonality.
What we have seen with “contact form thank you pages” are the abundance of pages created in WordPress with the same message over and over that quickly become unmanageable just so you can track it in GA.
WORSE, what we see are these pages being indexed, crawled, or accessed directly skewing the data in GA. Not only will you present false information but you will not be able to optimize accordingly. Also, a common mistake of not setting up the proper “noindex, follow” SEO rules leads to skewed data, and unprofessional results indexed in google.
Test out your own site.. type [ “thank you” site:domain.com ] in Google and see the results. If your page shows up, then you are guilty of not doing it right. No excuses, it’s 2019 already 🙂
We recently saw a website with about 15 thank you pages, with all pages being indexed on google. Our client was concerned about the amount of “conversions” in GA not matching up with the amount of form submissions. Making them think they were not receiving some messages.
After some thorough analyzing, we figured out for them what was actually happening.
There are BOTs out there crawling and hitting thank you pages on purpose. Many of them do so because they are trying to bypass an opt-in form and collect a PDF or other valuable information that is assumed to be on a thank you page.
We quickly fixed this situation by removing all thank you pages. Properly redirecting these pages to another page (not the homepage, we will cover redirects in another topic) and setting up a thank you messages for each form instead of redirecting to a thank you page.
Our client was using Gravity Forms (one of our favorite form plugins) which with a simple GA submission tracking addon, we had them up and running in no time with correct event tracking data.
Our client was amazed and surprised about how easy and accurate event tracking in GA vs tracking regular “thank you pages” was.
Not only did we consolidate the thank you pages, but we were able to consolidate the amount of forms they were using, by sending accurate event data mixed with conditional logic. Life was much easier again.
Opt-in thank you page
These are our favorite pages because not only do you acquire and opt-in email, but now is your chance to up-sell or further convert your lead.
If you are collecting emails from an opt-in form, especially if you are collecting them through paid traffic. Then you should definitely maximize your return by optimizing your thank you page for a second conversion.
Now what do we mean by this?
Lets say once your lead filled out the form and entered your thank you page. At this point, not only should you offer a valuable message, show authority and trust, but it is also your chance to get them to take action on another related subject.
For instance, you might want them to follow you on social media. Add a call-to-action that shows how valuable your posts are and prompt them to follow you using social media follow buttons.
What if you are having an amazing sale? Same principle. Let them know about it, show them value and add some urgency for them to take action.
Some of the things we see on these thank you pages are distracting exit links. If it’s an opt-in form where you need your prospect to take action, then don’t build your thank you page on the same pages that have a sidebar, header, and or footer from the main website.
All the links that surround your thank you page will and can distract the user. Build these pages the same way you will build a lead/squeeze page or “landing page” as some might call it. We will cover the principles of a great landing page on another topic.
Moral of the story? Take care of your thank you pages, they are very important!
What are your thoughts on thank you pages? Let us know in the comments.
