Viewing Submissions & Lead Tracking

Every time someone fills in one of your forms, StoutStack keeps a record of it. You'll find these under Forms → Form Submissions. The best part: this happens automatically and always, even if you never set up an email, Slack, or webhook notification. Notifications are just a convenience. The saved record is your reliable master list of the leads that come in.

What's in each submission

Open any submission and you'll see:

  • Which form it came from, so if you run several forms (contact, quote request, booking), you always know which one this lead used.
  • Every answer the visitor gave: each field and what they typed, laid out clearly.

That alone is enough to follow up with someone. But StoutStack also quietly records something extra that's genuinely valuable for growing your business: where the lead came from.

Marketing attribution: see which ad or campaign produced the lead

Alongside the answers, each submission automatically captures the visitor's marketing attribution, the trail of how they found you. You don't have to set anything up; it's recorded in the background for every submission. This includes:

  • Campaign source, medium, and campaign: the standard tracking tags (often called UTM values) that come attached to links in your ads, email newsletters, and social posts. These tell you things like "came from Google," "came from a Facebook ad," or "came from the July newsletter."
  • Ad-click identifiers: the special tags advertising platforms add when someone clicks a paid ad, so you can tie a lead back to a specific ad click.

First-touch and last-touch

StoutStack captures this attribution as both first-touch and last-touch, measured across a single visit:

  • First-touch is the first tagged link of that visit, normally the one that brought them to your site in that sitting.
  • Last-touch is the tagged link they clicked most recently before submitting the form. The two differ when somebody clicks through several of your links in one sitting, say they arrive from a Google ad, wander off, then come back through a Facebook post and fill in the form. When the two are the same, which is the usual case, the submission simply shows the one source; a separate "last touch" line only appears when they genuinely differ.

Together these answer the question every business owner wants answered: "Which of my marketing efforts is actually bringing in leads?" If you're spending money on ads or time on social posts, this is how you learn what's working and where to put more effort.

One honest limitation: this is remembered for the current browsing session only. If somebody finds you through an ad today, closes their browser, and comes back next week by typing your web address in directly, that second visit records no campaign at all. So read these figures as a strong signal of which campaigns produce leads, not as a complete history of how each customer found you. They undercount rather than overcount.

It travels with your notifications too

This attribution information isn't locked away in the submissions list. It's also included in the email, Slack, and webhook notifications you set up. So the moment a lead arrives, you can already see where they came from, and if you send submissions into another tool via a webhook, that source information goes along for the ride so your reports and automations can use it.

Spam protection, and testing your own form

Your forms have a quiet limit built in: five submissions an hour from any one visitor, and three an hour from any one email address. That turns away the bulk of bot spam without putting a puzzle in front of a real customer.

It has one practical consequence worth knowing about. If you're testing your own form and send it four or five times in a row, you'll be told there have been too many submissions. That's the guard doing its job, not a broken form. Wait an hour, or test again with a different email address.

Who can see submissions

Submissions can contain personal details, so access is kept tight:

  • Only signed-in members of your site can view them. They're never visible to the public.
  • Each site sees only its own submissions. Your leads are yours alone.

Important: submissions are kept for 90 days

Your submissions are saved in your account for 90 days (about three months), and older ones are then removed automatically. This keeps your list current and tidy, and it's good privacy practice too, since holding on to people's personal details forever, with no reason to, is something worth avoiding.

What this means for you: act on the leads that matter within that window. Following up promptly is good practice anyway. One thing to be clear about, though: there is no export button today, so you can't download your submissions as a spreadsheet. If you want a record that lasts, there are two ways that genuinely work:

  • Put a webhook on the form. Every submission is pushed to wherever you point it (a spreadsheet, your CRM, an automation tool) the moment it arrives, which is the only way to build an archive that outlives the 90 days. It only captures what comes in after you switch it on, so it's worth setting up on day one rather than on day 89. See Getting Notified: Email, Slack & Webhooks.
  • For leads already in your list, copy the details out by hand into wherever you keep customer records. If you have email notifications switched on, that email is itself a copy sitting in your inbox, so filing it away works too.

Anything older than 90 days drops off on its own, so there's no list for you to clean up by hand.

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