How to Remove Avada’s Auto Generated EID Parameter from the Gravity Forms Confirmation URL

I was able to get this problem solved in November 2018 with the help of Avada’s support team. When using Gravity Forms^* with the Avada WordPress theme, I would see an eid parameter automatically added to the confirmation page url with an extra long value like this:

/thank-you/?ref=583&eid=me6t014eZIqlcZPJ9TinHkmre+HumzmjyFu8eV6sbxuqUSvwbV8vPmy5UqBQhzNgY72TNbEW0wFn6Ph5KIc/IY6mwZHkWOZ8dMLECgJyx1ANvz0=

The eid parameter and its value would be generated automatically, and the value would be a different string each time a Gravity Form was submitted on a site using Avada. I had never had this problem using Gravity Forms, so I contacted them. Their advice was to switch to a default WordPress theme and test the form to see if I still was getting the automatically generated parameter and value. I switched to the Twenty Seventeen theme and did a few test submissions, and the confirmation page urls would end with a normal value like this:

/thank-you/?ref=583

The ref parameter is something I added myself by selecting the “Pass Field Data Via Query String”. As part of our SEO services, sometimes I append query strings to the end of confirmation page urls, so I can track different goals in Google Analytics without having to create multiple thank you pages that say the same thing.

Next, I contacted Avada’s tech support about the problem, and after proving to them that Gravity Forms was not the source of the problem, the support staff member found out that the automatically generated eid parameter and it’s value was added to confirmation page urls for compatibility with Gravity Forms’ Merge Tags feature. Their support team member also said that the eid parameter has always been added automatically on pages linked to Gravity Forms only.

To stop the automatically generated eid parameter from being added to the Gravity Forms confirmation page url, Avada’s support team advised me to add the following code to the child theme’s functions.php file:

function avada_gravity_form_merge_tags( $args = array() ) {
Avada_Gravity_Forms_Tags_Merger::get_instance( array( 'auto_append_eid' => false ) );
}

I added the code to the site’s child theme because I use a child theme on all of our WordPress sites where theme files are modified. It’s bad practice to modify a parent’s theme file unless we created the theme.

Back to the subject at hand, Avada’s automatically generated eid parameter and its long value made my clients’ Google Analytics data look really messy:

There are way more rows than the ones shown in the screenshot above. After Avada’s support team added the code to my client’s child theme’s functions.php file, the Google Analytics data looked much cleaner:

Five pages with a Gravity Form embedded in them is all I had for this client’s website. Avada’s tech support staff member had never encountered this problem before.

Thanks for reading this post. If you had this problem, I hope I was able to solve it for you. Feel free to share this post or comment below.

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