Testing attribution

The fastest way to trust attribution is to see it work on your own site. This takes about five minutes and confirms both halves: that untagged visits are classified correctly, and that tagged campaign links carry their UTM data all the way to the entry.

First, understand what a dash means

When you open a form entry, the Lead Attribution card may show - for the UTM fields. This is not a bug. It means the visit had no UTM parameters to capture.

UTM parameters live in the URL and nowhere else. They exist only when a visitor arrives on a link you have deliberately tagged. A direct visit — someone typing your address, clicking a bookmark, or navigating between your own pages — carries no UTM data, so the fields correctly show a dash.

This is true of every attribution system, including Google Analytics. What Sense Forms still captures on those visits is the traffic source, the referrer, the landing page and the device — so the entry is never empty, it just has no campaign to attribute.

Test 1: an untagged visit

1. Open a private or incognito window so you are not logged in as an administrator.
2. Go to a page with one of your forms, normally — no special URL.
3. Fill in the form and submit.
4. In Sense Forms → Entries, open the entry.

You should see Traffic Source: Direct (or a referrer, if you clicked through from another site), a landing page, and device details. The UTM fields show -. That is the correct result for an untagged visit.

Test 2: a tagged campaign link

This is the one that shows the payoff.

Take any page URL on your site and add UTM parameters to it:

https://your-site.com/contact-us/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=july-test&utm_term=forms&utm_content=header-link

1. Copy your tagged URL.
2. Open a fresh private or incognito window.
3. Paste the tagged URL and let the page load.
4. Fill in and submit the form.
5. Open the new entry in Sense Forms → Entries.

The Lead Attribution card will now show:

Field	Value
Traffic Source	Email
UTM Source	newsletter
UTM Medium	email
UTM Campaign	july-test
UTM Term	forms
UTM Content	header-link

Notice that Traffic Source classified itself as Email — it derived that from utm_medium=email without you setting it. That classification is the core of what the plugin does: it turns raw parameters into a channel you can group and count.

Try the other channels

Change the medium to see the classification respond. Each of these produces a different Traffic Source:

?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=test      →  Paid Search
?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=test →  Social
?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=test →  Referral

If a test visit is not tracked

Two things catch almost everyone out during testing:

You are logged in as an administrator. The Track logged-in administrators setting is off by default, so your own visits are ignored while you are logged into WordPress. This keeps your editing from polluting the data — but it also means you must test in a logged-out private window, or temporarily enable that setting.

A caching plugin is serving a stale page. Aggressive page caching can serve a cached copy before the tracker reads the live URL. If capture behaves inconsistently, clear the cache, or exclude the tracker script from caching, and test again.

What this proves

Once both tests pass, you know attribution is working end to end: untagged visits are classified by source, and tagged campaign links carry their full UTM detail to the entry. From here, every real submission arrives with its origin attached — which is the whole point.

For how the traffic source is classified in detail, see how attribution works. For building tagged links properly and the mistakes to avoid, see capturing UTM parameters.