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October 5, 2020

Why is there a Form Submit event on every page view?

Updated: October 5th, 2020

Here’s a situation. You enable a Preview and Debug mode in GTM, refresh the page and when the page loads, you see Form Submit (gtm.formSubmit) event on the left side of the Preview console. But the form on that page was not submitted! Or, maybe even worse, there is no form on that page at all!

Why is this happening? What is causing this? Spoiler alert: it’s Facebook Pixel.

In this quick blog post, I’ll explain what is happening and what you should do next (or shouldn’t?).

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A quick context

This does not happen on all projects but some of you have definitely seen it. Right during the page loading process (before the appearance of the Window Loaded event), there is a Form Submit event.

Even if that page does not contain any form, you might still see this event. And there are two prerequisites for this to appear:

  • You have Facebook Pixel implemented on a page
  • You have at least one built-in GTM Form Submission trigger enabled on a page.

If both of these “requirements” are met, you’ll see false Form Submit events. I call them false because they not related to actual forms that are a part of your website.

 

Why does this happen?

That’s just the way how Facebook Pixel sends now the data over to Facebook’s servers, via a form submission. According to Simo Ahava’s comment in GTM Community on Facebook, Facebook uses a form submission for the pixel simply because it’s the most cross-browser-safe to send data to another domain. It basically creates a form with the data, then submits the form, and finally deletes the form.

So it doesn’t matter whether you have a form on a page, or you don’t. Facebook Pixel will do that anyway, as long as it is implemented on your page.

Form Submission trigger just displays those submissions in the Preview and Debug console because that’s its purpose, to display Form Submission Events.

You can distinguish a normal/usual form submission from the Facebook Pixel one by looking at the Data Layer.

FB Pixel’s form submission can be identified by two parameters:

  • gtm.elementTarget (which can be used in GTM as a Form Target). Its value starts with fb and then is followed by some numbers.
  • gtm.elementUrl (which can be used in GTM as a Form URL). Its value is https://www.facebook.com/tr/.

 

So what can you do about that false Form Submit event?

Honestly, not much. That’s just how the FB Pixel works now. You will continue seeing that event in your preview and debug mode as long as you have at least one Form Submission trigger enabled on a page. But just to make sure that your trigger does not falsely fire a tag on such Form Submit, update your trigger’s conditions by adding the following line:

Form URL does not contain facebook.com/tr

Simple as that.

 

 

Julius Fedorovicius
In Google Tag Manager Tips
9 COMMENTS
KENYONB
  • May 10 2019
  • Reply

thanks for posting this. seeing gtm.formSubmit on every page was driving me nuts.

Alison
  • Jun 27 2019
  • Reply

Hi Julius,

This seems like an easy fix, however even after following your instructions the gtm.formSubmit is still showing up for every page load. Why wouldn't the trigger listen to the 'does not contain facebook.com/tr' condition?

    Julius Fedorovicius
    • Jun 27 2019
    • Reply

    You will continue seeing the event. But your tags will not fire then if all your form submission triggers exclude facebook's domain.

      Alison
      • Jun 27 2019
      • Reply

      Understood - thanks!

bruno alcantara
  • Jul 10 2019
  • Reply

Thanks so much man! I was looking all around the internet for a explanation about this and it was driving me crazy trying to understand what the heck was happening. Good and helpful post!

JK Baseer
  • Jul 29 2019
  • Reply

Hey Julius,
As we know facebook fires a default form submission trigger with click url "Facebook.com/tr/"

so in all form submission, we have excluded when the click URL is "Facebook.com/tr/". Recently in normal legit form submission also have this "Facebook.com/tr" URL and so this legit conversion are not attributed.

Do you know how we can avoid this situation?

    Acgorecki
    • Aug 17 2020
    • Reply

    I have the same question. Did you ever figure this out?
    I have the FB pixel installed and and excluding facebook.com/tr on my triggers so it blocks the initial form submission while page is loading, but it is still blocking legit form submissions because the form URL contains facebook.com/tr

Shawn
  • Sep 13 2019
  • Reply

This was really helpful and fixed my issue. Just wanted to say thanks.

Elena Petrova
  • Nov 1 2019
  • Reply

Excellent article! Thanks a lot, Julius!

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Hi, I'm Julius Fedorovicius and I'm here to help you learn Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. Join thousands of other digital marketers and digital analysts in this exciting journey. Read more
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