A form click is not an accepted inquiry

Use the live names, not the planning names

The current first-party contract uses four exact names: page_viewed, cta_clicked, inquiry_started, and inquiry_submitted. The first three describe browser-side observations. They can tell us that a supported page loaded, a labeled decision link was used, or the inquiry form received its first interaction. None of them establishes that the form passed validation or reached storage.

An earlier operating design used contact_form_submitted and inquiry_accepted as conceptual terms. They helped separate interface success from durable acceptance, but they are not the released event names and should not be totaled beside the live events as though they came from one dataset. The public journal now follows the implemented contract instead of preserving a tidier old diagram.

A receipt belongs at the receiving end

The inquiry handler validates the required fields, writes the inquiry and its inquiry_submitted event together, and reads back the retained reference before returning acceptance. Repeating the same submission key returns the original receipt instead of creating another pair of records. The generic browser-event endpoint now rejects inquiry_submitted, so a browser observation cannot award itself the server’s evidence label.

Abuse handling is another reason to avoid counting every successful-looking response. A filled decoy field receives a harmless response without creating either record. A failed save returns an error. The useful rule is simple: confirmation follows retained acceptance, not animation, HTTP activity, or optimism.

Internal review is still traffic

Launch checks, screenshots, health checks, and our own browsing can create events. The collector suppresses an explicitly tagged internal session and browsers that report WebDriver automation. That reduces future contamination; it does not identify every automated browser, reconstruct older rows, or prove that every remaining event came from an external person.

The event rows also intentionally have no analytics visitor identifier. Counts can describe stored events over a stated period, but they are not unique people and cannot support a person-level conversion rate. Any future report needs the exact source, date range, exclusions, event definition, and missing evidence beside the number.

The business continues after the form

A stored inquiry is not automatically a qualified opportunity. A qualified conversation is not a proposal. A proposal is not signed work, and signed work does not prove that one page change caused the outcome. Those later states belong in separate commercial records with their own dates and definitions.

Privacy stays part of the design. The event payload has no dedicated fields for a person’s name, email, message, query string, referrer URL, analytics user ID, IP address, or device fingerprint. Campaign tokens are normalized and bounded, but that syntax check is not a magic personal-data detector. Reporting still needs review, restraint, and aggregation.

No traffic lift, conversion rate, qualified inquiry, signed project, revenue, or causal result is claimed in this note. It documents what the released measurement contract can establish—and stops where the evidence stops.