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Inquiry Forms Overview

Cortado’s inquiry form is an embeddable lead-capture form designed for event businesses. It runs as a hosted experience and drops into your website with a small snippet — visitors fill it out, a new inquiry lands in your Leads Pipeline, the submitter becomes a contact, and your team gets notified. Everything about the form is configured under Settings > Inquiry Form in your Cortado admin. That page is organized into six sub-sections:
  • Publish — copy the snippet that drops the form onto your website, plus your hosted form URL
  • Fields & Services — choose which add-on items appear on the form
  • Availability — block specific dates on the date picker
  • Theme — colors, fonts, and corner style
  • Confirmation — your post-submission success message and optional redirect URL
  • Analytics — attach a GA4 Measurement ID and Google Ads conversion label
The “Inquiry CC Email” — the secondary address that receives a copy of every new inquiry notification — is not under Inquiry Forms. It lives under Settings > Company > General as the Inquiry CC Email field.

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Publish

The Embed Form sub-section gives you the code snippet to paste into your website. There are two layouts to choose from, and you can copy the snippet for either one from a tab on the page.

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Multi-step vs Single-page

  • Multi-step wizard — walks the visitor through four steps: event basics, services, add-ons, and contact info. Best for longer forms where you want to ease the visitor in.
  • Single-page — every field is visible at once on a single scrollable page. Best for short forms or when visitors prefer to see the whole thing up front.
You can switch between the two by copying a different snippet — no other configuration changes are required.

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The Embed Snippet

Each form gets a unique target id. Paste this snippet into your website wherever you want the form to appear:
The data-single-page attribute controls the layout — false for the multi-step wizard, true for the single-page version. The Embed Form page in Cortado generates the snippet with the right value selected for you. Embed Form settings with the hosted form URL and website embed code
Paste the snippet into any HTML page, landing page builder, or CMS block that accepts custom code. Cortado handles the rest — you don’t need to host any files yourself.

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Custom Subdomain

If a custom subdomain is enabled for your organization, your hosted form can live at a branded URL like yourcompany.cortadopro.com instead of the shared forms.cortado.pro host. The subdomain uses your organization slug, which you set under Settings > Company > General. When the custom subdomain is active, the embed snippet on the Embed Form page automatically uses your branded URL.

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Re-copying the Snippet

The embed snippet loads a hosted script from Cortado, so most improvements ship automatically without you doing anything. Re-grabbing the snippet after a change is rarely necessary. The script now draws the form frame as soon as the page loads — even on a slow mobile connection or a site builder that waits for the iframe — so the embed no longer looks missing while Cortado finishes resolving the URL.
One exception: if you embedded the form before our Google Ads conversion improvements shipped, copy the latest snippet from the Embed Form page once. Google Ads conversions now fire from the host page (your website) rather than from inside the iframe, which produces more reliable attribution — and older embeds need the refreshed script to take advantage of it.

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Fields & Services

Fields & Services controls which add-on items from your catalog appear on the inquiry form.
  • Drag-and-drop reordering — set the order add-ons appear to the customer.
  • Per-item include toggle — show or hide individual catalog items on the form without removing them from your catalog.
  • Manage Catalog link — jumps directly to your catalog where you maintain the underlying items.
If you don’t have any add-on items in your catalog, the Add-ons step is hidden automatically on the public form. There’s nothing to configure if you don’t sell add-ons.

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Theme

Theme controls how the form looks — colors, fonts, and corner style — so it matches your brand. Use a preset or set your own brand color. Changes apply to both the embedded form and the hosted form URL.

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Confirmation

Confirmation controls what visitors see after they submit the form.

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Success Message

Cortado ships with a default post-submission confirmation along the lines of “Thank you for your interest. We’ve received your inquiry…” — perfectly fine, but generic. Replace it with copy in your own brand voice:
1

Open Confirmation

Go to Settings > Inquiry Form > Confirmation.
2

Edit the Success Message

Type your custom confirmation message into the Success Message field.
3

Save

The new message appears the next time a visitor submits the form.
If you want to go back to the original copy, click Use default text to revert.

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Redirect URL

Instead of (or in addition to) showing the success message in place, you can send customers to a page on your own website after they submit — a thank-you page, a calendar booking link, or a next-step landing page.
  • The URL must be HTTPS.
  • For embedded forms, Cortado redirects the host page (your website), not just the iframe — so the visitor lands on a clean full-page experience.
  • On the standalone hosted form, the success screen flashes briefly before the redirect runs.
A dedicated thank-you page is a great place to add Google Ads conversion tracking, post-submission instructions, or a follow-up call-to-action like “Schedule a call”.

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Analytics

Analytics attaches your tracking IDs to the inquiry form. Both fields have their own Save and Reset buttons, so you can configure one without touching the other.
  • Google Tag Measurement ID — supports G-, GT-, and AW- prefixes (Google Analytics 4, Google Tag, and Google Ads IDs respectively).
  • Google Ads Conversion Label — the full AW-XXXXXXXXXX/abc_def format from your Google Ads conversion action.
When configured, Cortado automatically fires page view, step view, and submission events to GA4, and a conversion event to Google Ads when the form is submitted. You don’t need to add any of your own tracking code to the embed page.
The Analytics setup, supported ID prefixes, event names, and Google Ads conversion walkthrough are documented in full in the Analytics guide below.

Set up Google Analytics & Google Ads

Step-by-step setup for GA4 Measurement IDs and Google Ads conversion labels.

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Availability

Availability lets you block specific dates from the form’s date picker — useful for blackout dates, sold-out weekends, holidays you don’t work, or any day you don’t want to take inquiries for.

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Blocking a Date

1

Open Availability

Go to Settings > Inquiry Form > Availability.
2

Pick a date

Select the date you want to block.
3

Add an optional reason

Type a short note — for example, “Closed for Thanksgiving” or “Owner traveling”. The reason is for your team’s reference and appears in the table; visitors don’t see it.
4

Save

The date is immediately blocked on the form date picker.
Upcoming US holidays appear as one-click suggestions, so blocking common dates like Thanksgiving or Christmas only takes a single click. Customers can’t select blocked dates when filling out the form — those days appear disabled in the date picker.

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The Public Form Experience

This is what your customers actually see when they open your embedded form. Knowing how it behaves helps you preview your setup and explain it to your team.

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Layout

The form renders as a multi-step wizard or a single page depending on which embed snippet you used. Both layouts collect the same information:
  • Event basics (date, time, type)
  • Services or event details
  • Add-ons (hidden automatically if you haven’t configured any)
  • Contact info (name, email, phone)

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Mobile Pickers

On phones and small screens below the tablet breakpoint, the date and time pickers use the OS-native iOS and Android pickers — the same wheel and spinner customers know from every other app. On desktop, Cortado’s own calendar popover is used for a richer experience with month navigation and visible blocked dates.

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Past Dates

The date picker disables past dates automatically. Customers can’t accidentally submit an inquiry for a date that’s already passed.

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Source Attribution

Cortado automatically captures marketing attribution data on every submission:
  • UTM parameters — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content
  • Google Click IDs — gclid from Google Ads, plus the newer gbraid, wbraid, gad_source, and gad_campaignid parameters Google adds to ad clicks
  • Facebook Click IDs — fbclid from Meta ads
Attribution is captured from both the form URL itself and the host page where the form is embedded — so visitors who arrive on your homepage via a Google Ad and then click through to your inquiry form still get attributed correctly. Direct visits from Instagram bios, ad landing pages, partner sites, and email newsletters all attach the right source data to the inquiry. For how these parameters turn into the source badge you see on a lead, see Inquiry Source Attribution in the Leads Pipeline guide.
Use UTM parameters in your ad and campaign URLs to see which channels produce the best leads. The attribution data follows the inquiry into Cortado so you can report on it later.

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Where Submissions Go

When a visitor submits the form, Cortado does several things in one step:
  1. A new inquiry is created in the New stage of your Leads Pipeline.
  2. The submitter is captured as a contact in your CRM — or matched to an existing contact if the email is already on file.
  3. The captured event details, add-ons, and attribution data are attached to the inquiry.
  4. Notifications fire to your configured channels: Slack, email, and in-app — depending on what you’ve enabled.
From there, the inquiry flows through your normal lead workflow: follow up, send a quote, accept, and book.

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Best Practices

  1. Test your form before going live — submit a test inquiry yourself to confirm the flow, then check that it appears in Leads, fires notifications, and (if configured) registers analytics events.
  2. Keep the form short — only ask for what you genuinely need to qualify the lead. Long forms convert worse, and you can collect more details later by phone or email.
  3. Customize the success message — replace the generic default with copy in your brand voice and set expectations on what happens next (for example, “We’ll be in touch within 24 hours”).
  4. Block unavailable dates around blackouts — holidays, sold-out weekends, and personal time off are easier to manage when customers can’t request them in the first place.
  5. Use UTMs on every ad URL — ?utm_source=instagram&utm_campaign=summer-2026 on your campaign links makes attribution in Cortado meaningful.
  6. Re-copy the embed snippet after major changes — most updates are automatic, but if you’ve had the form embedded for a long time, grabbing the latest snippet ensures you get all the recent improvements.

Analytics

Track form performance with Google Analytics and Google Ads conversions.

Catalog

Manage the add-on items that appear on the Form Options page.

Leads Pipeline

Follow up on form submissions as they land in the New stage.

Booking Questionnaires

Collect extra details after the lead becomes a booking — not on the inquiry form.

Slack

Get a Slack notification the moment a new inquiry is submitted.