While working on a landing page, I saw that the main call-to-action – a form, did not show a “thank you” response page when the form was submitted. It simply displayed a message, which I almost missed at the bottom of the form that read, “Thanks, we will get back to you soon”. Slips like this can impact your bottom line because this not only frustrates visitors but can also deprive you of the much needed conversion data to optimize your ad campaigns.

Consider the following five reasons why “thank you” response pages make horse sense on your website:

1. Mapping Responses: A “thank you” page helps in response-mapping in your own databases. It’s also helpful to quickly see if it’s the “next” page in navigation, in Google Analytics and other website tracking software, to pinpoint how much action is being taken by visitors on your landing page.

2. Setting Goals: You can easily set goals in Google Analytics and other web tracking software with a “thank you” response page.

3. SEO: If there’s no “thank you” page after a form, then action taken by visitors will not show as a “next page” response in Google Analytics and will show an “exit” instead, if visitors leave the web site after submitting the form. That’s important for SEO as “next page” responses show visitor engagement and increase the time spent on your site, and that’s reason enough to believe that these are factored-in in Google ranking algorithms.

4. Mapping Conversions: A thank you page is required to see conversions if you choose to configure your conversion script on “page load” when you are running a Google Ads campaign (previously known as Google Adwords). You need to place the Adwords “event” conversion script on the page that comes next, after visitors take expected action. With this script configuration option, Google Ads can only map a conversion when a user clicks on an ad, lands on the landing page, takes action and lands on the “thank you” response page. When the conversion script is activated on the response page, the loop is completed and it shows up as a conversion in the Google Ads console.

Now it’s important to note that there’s another option to configure the script using an “on click” option, which let’s you track conversions when visitors click on the “submit” button on your forms. But the former (on page load) option is preferred because of the following reasons:

1. If the submit button or form-functionality is erratic, the form data might not even get submitted but the event script will still be fired.
2. “On click” conversion event scripts could fire even if a visitor clicks without filling in the form, thus registering a conversion that never happened.
3. Thank-you page loads are better pointers to conversions because at least there’s a confirmation for the event when a visitor goes through the form and lands on the thank-you page after clicking on the submit button. This can also be validated in Google Analytics by configuring a goal using your thank-you page as the final page and a preceding landing page visit as a mandatory qualifier.

Mapping conversions is very important to optimize and increase your Google Ads’ campaign quality score especially when you are running your campaign on CPA (cost per acquisition) bids. The more the conversions from the clicks in your campaign, the higher goes the quality score and lower go your costs per conversion. It’s a win-win all around – your campaign, your leads, your money.

5. Engagement: “Thank you” pages are an element of expected usability that help visitors understand that their action has been registered. Most importantly, from a conversion perspective, they can be used to take visitors to logical next steps and can also help in cross-selling and up-selling. This helps in furthering engagement on the website that in turn triggers the 3rd point above – SEO, and helps your website get stronger in SERPs.

Cons? More pros? I invite you to discuss in comments.