Direction Lead Trace

A WordPress plugin that proves whether CallRail actually captured your form leads — and catches the spam/captcha-blocked leads that reach CallRail but never hit your inbox.

If you've ever had a client say "a lead showed up in CallRail but we never got the email," this plugin is built for exactly that. It gives you an authoritative, server-side record of every form submission and tells you, per submission, whether CallRail really recorded it and whether the email actually sent — so you can stop guessing.

The problem it solves

CallRail's form tracking is 100% client-side (the swap.js script). It captures a lead the instant the visitor clicks Submit, in the browser, before your server has done anything. That creates two blind spots that look identical to a confused client — "the lead is in CallRail but not in our inbox" — but have opposite causes:

1. The lead reached CallRail but not the email. The submission was rejected server-side after CallRail already captured it — most often by:

   • a spam/captcha filter (reCAPTCHA v3, Cloudflare Turnstile, Akismet) silently flagging a real person, or
   • an ordinary field-validation failure (a required dropdown left blank, a phone field that rejects "call me" / "ext. 4", etc.).

   The email never sends, and — critically — Flamingo and most form-entry plugins don't record it either, because they hook the mail-sent step, which never runs. The lead vanishes from WordPress entirely while living on in CallRail.

2. The lead reached the email but not CallRail. The visitor blocked calltrk.com (Brave, Safari/Firefox tracking protection, uBlock, a DNS blocker), or swap.js was deferred / scoped to the wrong pages. The lead emails and saves normally but never reaches CallRail.

CallRail's v3 API can list and update form submissions but cannot create them, so no plugin can push a missing lead into CallRail after the fact. Instead, Direction Lead Trace makes the gap visible and diagnosable.

What it does

• Logs every submission server-side into its own table — an authoritative record independent of CallRail, the form plugin, and email.
• Captures spam/captcha-blocked leads. For Contact Form 7 it hooks wpcf7_submit (which fires on every outcome) instead of wpcf7_mail_sent (success only), so submissions rejected by reCAPTCHA/Turnstile/Akismet — the ones Flamingo misses — are captured with their name/phone/email so you can follow up.
• Records a per-submission CallRail verdict from a first-party signal cookie: did swap.js actually load (ad blockers leave the `