If you've ever tried to figure out which ad, email, or social post actually drove a form submission, you already know the problem: UTM parameters are fragile. They get stripped by link shorteners, dropped on redirects, lost in in-app browsers (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), and wiped out the moment someone bookmarks your form and comes back to finish it the next day. If you're running paid campaigns, affiliate programs, or multi-channel marketing and relying only on utm_source/utm_medium/utm_campaign in your form analytics, you're flying blind on a big chunk of your traffic.
This update fixes that. Orbiform now ships with real attribution tracking, built-in spam and bot filtering, a significantly deeper Analytics tab, and a couple of smaller quality-of-life additions across the whole product. Here's everything that's new.
Most form builders and survey tools stop at reading utm_source and utm_medium off the query string. That works — until it doesn't:
- A visitor clicks your Google Ad, but their browser (or an ad blocker) strips the UTM params before your form page ever loads.
- Someone shares your form link in Slack or WhatsApp, and the link preview crawler is what actually "visits" first, polluting your traffic data.
- A lead starts your form on their phone during a commute, closes the tab, and finishes it two days later from their laptop — with no query string at all on that second visit.
- You're running Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and an affiliate program simultaneously, each with its own click-ID convention (
gclid, fbclid, ttclid, li_fat_id...), and your analytics only understands UTMs.
None of these are edge cases — they're the normal, everyday reality of running multi-channel marketing. So instead of bolting on "just read the UTMs," we built a proper attribution tracking layer into Orbiform's core.
Orbiform now recognizes the click identifiers from every major ad platform out of the box: gclid/gbraid/wbraid (Google Ads), fbclid (Meta), msclkid (Microsoft Ads), ttclid (TikTok Ads), li_fat_id (LinkedIn Ads), twclid (X/Twitter Ads), and more. If someone clicked a paid ad to get to your form, Orbiform knows which platform — even when the campaign didn't bother setting UTMs.
Custom tracking params, automatically
Beyond the standard set, Orbiform captures any other query parameter appended to your form's link — not just utm_*. Running a custom tracking scheme for a newsletter, a QR code campaign, or a partner integration? Whatever parameter you append shows up in the new "Custom tracking params" breakdown in Analytics, with zero configuration.
First-touch attribution that survives partial submissions
This is the part that actually makes attribution real instead of theoretical: attribution data is captured the moment a visitor lands on your form and persisted client-side, so it survives across a multi-session, "come back later to finish" submission. Whoever clicked your ad today and finally submits the form three days later is still correctly attributed to that original ad — not counted as "Direct" traffic just because the return visit had no query string.
IP geolocation — know where your respondents actually are
Every form view and submission is now enriched with IP-based geolocation: country, region, city, and timezone. Combined with source data, you can finally answer questions like "which country converts best from our Google Ads campaign" or "are our EU submissions coming from the campaign we expect."
Spam and bot filtering, without blocking anyone
Real attribution data is only useful if it's not drowned out by bot traffic and spam submissions. Orbiform now runs every form view and submission through a lightweight, non-blocking spam-detection layer:
- Honeypot fields — invisible to real visitors, but bots that blindly fill every input on a page trip it immediately.
- Bot-pattern user agents — headless browsers, scrapers, and common bot signatures are flagged.
- Submission speed — a full form completed in under 1.5 seconds is not humanly possible.
- Datacenter/VPN/proxy IPs — residential and mobile traffic looks different from datacenter and proxy traffic, and that difference is now visible.
Nothing gets silently blocked — a false positive would mean losing a real response, which is worse than seeing an extra flagged row. Instead, every suspicious signal is recorded and surfaced in Analytics so you can review and decide for yourself.
A deeper Analytics tab
The Analytics tab for every form now includes:
- Top sources — UTM source, ad platform (from click IDs), or referrer domain, ranked.
- Top campaigns and mediums — straight from
utm_campaign / utm_medium. - Top locations — by city and country, from IP geolocation.
- Custom tracking params — whatever non-standard parameters your campaigns are using.
- Views by source — compare traffic volume against submissions by source, to spot channels that drive clicks but don't convert.
- A spam/bot flag summary — how many submissions look suspicious, and why.
- A drop-off funnel — per-question completion rates, so you can see exactly where in a long form people abandon it, using both partial and completed responses.
Attribution and geolocation data isn't siloed in one dashboard — it flows through everything Orbiform already integrates with:
- Webhooks (Make, n8n, Zapier) — every
response.created payload now includes a full attribution object alongside answers. - MCP tools — if you've connected Orbiform to Claude.ai or another MCP client,
list_responses, get_response, and get_analytics all return attribution and geo/spam breakdowns. - Ask AI / AI Insights — ask your form "which campaign brought the most signups" or "how many responses came from Google Ads" and get a real answer, not a shrug.
Bonus: know where your signups come from too
It's not just form respondents — new Orbiform account signups now capture the visitor's country via the same IP geolocation lookup, shown right in the admin dashboard next to each user's plan and trial status. If you're trying to understand which regions are driving your own growth, that data is there from day one of the account.
Bonus: Microsoft Clarity, wired in
Orbiform now runs Microsoft Clarity site-wide, giving the team session recordings, heatmaps, and click/scroll analytics on top of the existing product analytics — useful for spotting UX friction that raw conversion numbers alone don't explain.
Try it
If you're already using Orbiform, there's nothing to turn on — attribution tracking, spam filtering, and the new Analytics breakdowns are live on every form automatically. Head to any form's Analytics tab to see your traffic sources, locations, and drop-off funnel for the first time.
Haven't tried Orbiform yet? Build your first AI-powered form and see exactly which campaign it came from.
