Google Apps Form for Website Visitor Contact

Use a Google Apps Form to capture website visitor contact information

Google Apps for Business, which incidentally has recently become known as Google Apps for Work, is a collection of Cloud based Apps that allow you to carry out many office admin tasks in one place, using your own domain name (like mybusiness.co.uk) and linked to your branded business email (Gmail).

In this article we look at how you can use a Google Apps Form to capture the details of a visitor to your website that wants to get in touch with you.  To be able to use this method, you will need to have access to the HTML (code that makes your web pages work) of the page where you would like the form to be placed.  Beyond that, it’s a relatively straightforward process.  There are a few steps, but it isn’t hugely complicated and shouldn’t take too long to get up and running.

So why use a Google Apps Form in the first place?

Well there are a good number of options out there, but the real advantage of the Google Apps approach is that the set-up and recorded information all end up being in one place, within your Google Drive.  This means that you don’t have to log-on to another system.  All the end user input is placed in a spreadsheet within your Google Drive and enquiries from customers can also be emailed directly to your Gmail Inbox.

There are now a good number of costs effective, easy to use, online website builders, such as Wix and Weebly.  However, one area you may struggle is if you need to capture more information than the basic website contact form allows.

You may consider getting a (web) developer to make you a data capture from to put in you website, but you may need to go back to them if you want to change the questions and the type of information you record.  With the Google Apps Form the questions are very easy to modify, both adding, removing and changing the order of them.

You may consider using another online form builder, but as pointed out above that’s another place to access to make changes and potentially retrieve the data captured.

How do I create a Google Apps Form and use it on my Website?

OK, that’s enough with the introduction.  How does it work and more importantly how to get a Google Apps data capture form up and running on my own web site?  Now, everything does rely on you having a Google Apps for Work account attached to your domain name (web site address, minus the www), but assuming this is already the case, most of the set-up is done in your Google Drive.

In this example we’re going to use a website form already that was already created by AWP Computer Services for one of our clients, Alpha Dog Services, which is used on their Dog Almighty! website.

http://www.dog-almighty.co.uk/contact.htm

 Dog Almighty - Contact Form: http://www.dog-almighty.co.uk/contact.htm

Accessing Google Drive

From your Google (Apps for Work) account, once you’re logged in, you’ll be able to access your Google Drive.

Google Drive - Google Apps for Work

Your Google Drive is the place that all your files that are stored in the Cloud (well on your account Google servers at least) can be accessed, this includes the files created using the various Google Docs Apps (including Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides & Sites) as well as other documents and files you may have uploaded.

Google Drive page

Whilst Alpha Dog Services have been using their GMail account to its full potential, and their Drive quite often, they set up a separate user (on their domain) for us and we created the necessary form here.  Even though there aren't any other document shared with us here at the moment, we thought it made sense to create a new folder (called 'Website') to ensure that the form for the website wasn't confused with other things in the future.

Google Drive - Website folder

Within this ‘Website’ folder we created a new form, for the data capture needed by the website’s ‘Contact Us’ page.  This can be seen as “Dog Almighty - Contact Form”.

Google Drive showing link to the Dog Almighty - Contact Form

However, if the necessary form hadn't been created, it would be a case of starting a new form by using the "Create" button at the top of the menu on the left hand side of the page.

Google Drive - Create Form

As mentioned, our form is already in place, so in the style of ‘Blue Peter’ - here’s one we made earlier!  Clicking on the link for the 'Dog Almighty - Contact Form' will open a Form designer page within a new tab in our web browser.

Rename your Google Form

Create question - Data Validation

Advanced settings - Validation: Must be an email address

Completing your form and putting in your web site

Once you are happy that you have included all the questions you required for you contact page form you are ready to take the necessary steps to allow the form to be used on your website.  The first step is to set up the rules for the 'Confirmation Page'.  Here you can create a personalised message that the end user will see after they have completed and submitted the form.  You can also decide whether you want to provide a link with your 'Thank you' message that will let users navigate back to a blank form and submit another answer.