The ultimate guide to custom confirmations in Gravity Forms

So you’re using Gravity Forms to capture leads on your website. A user lands on the page, inputs their information, and clicks “Submit”. Now what?

Getting the user’s email address may be the ultimate goal of your landing page, but the user experience doesn’t end there. Have you ever considered what happens after the user signs up for your free ebook or RSVPs to your upcoming event?

That’s where Gravity Forms Confirmations come in. In this post, we’ll explain the different types of confirmations, and show you how to create personalized confirmation messages using conditional logic. We’ll also show you how to do other fancy things, like pass form data to another page, or prepopulate a form based on data from a different form!

Keep reading to find out more.

How to change the confirmation message in Gravity Forms

For any new form you create, Gravity Forms adds a default confirmation message, but you can easily remove this or replace it with your own. In fact, Gravity Forms allows you to create as many confirmations as you want.

To add a new Confirmation, go to the Forms page by hovering over “Forms” and clicking on “Forms”. Next, hover over your form, click “Settings” and then click on the “Confirmations” tab on the left. To create a new confirmation, click “Add New”.

There are three different confirmations types in Gravity Forms:

• Text: Display a message to the user after they submit your form.
• Page: Send the user to a specific page on your website after they submit your form.
• Redirect: Redirect the user to a custom URL after they submit your form.

Each of these different Confirmation types supports conditional logic, allowing you to trigger the confirmation only when specific conditions are met. We’ll show you some examples of how this works below, but first…

Why personalize your form confirmation messages?

There are several reasons to customize and personalize your Gravity Forms confirmation messages. 

After submitting your form, seeing a short “thank you” message doesn’t give the user enough information about what they should do next or where they should go. Inadequate confirmations may result in users getting frustrated and leaving your website. 

Displaying an informative confirmation message or redirecting users to a relevant page on your website allows you to keep users engaged with your content. Remember, the longer a user stays on your site, the more likely they are to share your content or purchase your products.

Creating personalized confirmation messages goes a long way towards improving the overall user experience. This, in turn, strengthens trust in your brand and helps to improve your SEO.

Imagine you have a form on your website allowing users to request more information about your services. Using custom confirmations you could show users relevant information based on the services they’re interested in. This is more impactful than displaying a generic message to all users, don’t you think?

Displaying user entries in the confirmation message

Did you know that you can display user-submitted data inside confirmation messages? This type of confirmation shows the user exactly what information was captured when they clicked “Submit”. It’s a helpful reminder that confirms their submission was successfully sent.

To show user-submitted content in the confirmation message, select “Text” as the Confirmation Type and add the merge tags corresponding to the fields you want to display inside the text editor.

💡 Pro tip: Merge tags in Gravity Forms allow you to display data about a form, an entry, or a specific field. Learn more about merge tags.

To add merge tags to your confirmation message, click on the icon to the right-hand side of the “Add Media” button. In the below example, we’re displaying user registration information for our upcoming Galactic Exploration event.

Here’s what our confirmation message looks like on the front end.

Alternatively, instead of adding individual merge tags to the confirmation message, you could add all fields using a single merge tag! To do this, open the merge tag list and select the top one titled “All Submitted Fields”.

This merge tag displays the user’s submission in a neat-looking format that’s pre-styled.

It’s important to understand that the confirmation message will be displayed in place of the form when the user submits their entry. This all takes place on the same page. Sometimes you may wish to send the user to a separate page (like a Thank You page). This is possible using a redirect.

Redirecting the user to a “Thank You” page

To create a confirmation redirect, select “Redirect” as your “Confirmation Type”. Now enter your desired URL into the “Redirect URL” box. This is the URL that the user will be sent to after completing their submission!

In this example, we’re sending the user to the “Thank You” page on our website.

Passing data to the confirmation page

Redirecting users to a page on your website is helpful, but what if you want to display user submitted data on that page? This is possible using GravityView!

GravityView is an add-on for Gravity Forms that allows you to display form entries on the front end of your website! You can embed entry data into pages and posts, or build powerful applications like directories and job boards.

One of the advantages of using GravityView is that it allows users to edit their form submissions directly from the front end. Here’s a simple example:

To get set up with GravityView follow the steps below:

• Create a new View and select an existing form as the data source
• Choose how you want to display the data by selecting a View Type
• Configure the Single Entry Layout by adding fields and widgets
• Copy the View URL

Now go back to your form and create a new “Redirect” confirmation. In the “Redirect URL” field, paste your View URL. Now, to ensure that users get sent to the correct entry, you’ll need to add the entry ID merge tag to the URL, like this:

https://example.com/view/galactic-exploration/entry/{entry_id}/

This will update the URL dynamically, ensuring that users get redirected to the correct page! To see what’s possible with GravityView, check out our build it guides.

Using a confirmation to pre-populate a new form

One of the most powerful things you can do using confirmations is populate a new form based on data in another submission. Here’s what that looks like:

• User submits form A
• User is redirected to a page containing form B
• Form B is prepoluated with data based on the user’s initial submission to form A

Here’s a general guide for setting this up:

• Create a new redirect confirmation for form A
• Add the data you want to pass to form B using URL query strings
• Enable dynamic population on the fields in form B for receiving data
• Add the relevant query string as the parameter name
• Repeat this for all fields receiving data

💡 Pro tip: For a complete guide on how to do this, check out the Gravity Forms documentation.

Next, we’ll look at displaying custom confirmations using conditional logic.

Displaying custom confirmations based on conditional logic

Gravity Forms Confirmations also support conditional logic, allowing you to display different confirmations based on the information entered in the user’s submission. If you’re unfamiliar with conditional logic, think of it as a decision-making process that says “when X, do Y”.

In other words, conditional logic allows you to set up a condition and then specify an action to be carried out when that condition is met. Here’s an example: If the user’s name is “Molly”, display “Hello, Molly!”.

To configure the conditional logic settings, scroll down to the bottom of the Confirmation page and check the box that says “Enable conditional logic”.

You’ll now see four dropdown menus appear, allowing you to configure one or multiple conditional logic statements. Let’s go through a simple example:

1. Choose whether to use ANY or AND logic
   This option is only applicable to cases where you have set more than one condition. If set to “all”, then all conditions must match. If set to “any” then only one of the conditions has to match.

2. Field
   The field in your form.

3. Parameter
   Accepted parameters include: is, is not, contains, greater than, less than, starts with, and ends with.

4. Value
   The value to compare the field against.

In the above example, we’re only displaying the confirmation message if the user chose Saturn as their favorite planet! You can probably see how this would be helpful for personalizing and customizing confirmation messages based on a user’s submission.

Example #2: Conditional confirmation using “greater than”

In this example, we’re using the greater than parameter to only display the confirmation message if the user’s age is greater than 21.

Example #3: Conditional confirmation using “contains”

Here’s an example where we’re using the contains parameter to only display the confirmation message only if the “Dietary requirements” field contains the word “vegan”. In other words, as long as the word “vegan” appears somewhere in the user’s response, the confirmation message will be displayed.

Now let’s see how we can use conditional redirects to add more information and personalization to our confirmation messages.

Customizing Gravity Forms confirmations: Final thoughts

Gravity Forms Confirmations allow you to display messages or redirect users after they submit your form. In this post, we showed you how to create custom confirmations in Gravity Forms using merge tags and conditional logic.

The most important thing to understand about conditional logic is that it allows you to personalize the user experience by giving the user the information they need or sending them where they need to go.

If you found this post helpful, learn more about Gravity Forms conditional logic or subscribe to our blog below so we can notify you when we publish new content!