Hello;
It was on my to-do list for a long time. (with a lot of non-visible code improvements)
Why nothing showed in Tag Manager. The Lead event was server-side only. (It was because not everyone using CF7) The plugin sent it straight to Meta from your server, and never pushed anything to the data layer — so there was nothing for Tag Manager to see, no tag to trigger, and no way for you to tell whether it had worked.
That was a gap, not a setting you had wrong. The 3.11.0 adds the browser half: a listener on Contact Form 7’s own submit event, a mcapi_lead data layer push, and Lead tags for Meta, TikTok and Pinterest in the bundled container template. (You will need to re-import the template once it is out. Choose Merge, then Overwrite conflicting tags, triggers, and variables)
And a second problem underneath it, which is probably why you saw nothing at Meta either. The plugin was listening for Contact Form 7’s wpcf7_mail_sent hook — the one that fires only when the notification email is actually sent.
I tested this with Contact Form 7 installed: on a site where mail delivery fails, that hook never fires at all, so the Lead was silently dropped. No error, no entry in the Event Log, nothing.
Broken or misconfigured mail is very common on WordPress hosting and usually invisible, because wp_mail() failing looks like nothing happened. It is worth checking whether your form’s notification emails are actually arriving — if they are not, that alone would explain no Lead ever reaching Meta.
Either way the plugin should not have depended on it: a form submission is a lead whether or not your own notification email reached your inbox. It now listens for the hook that fires when a submission passes validation, independent of mail delivery. Submissions that fail validation still do not count, so a spam bot filling in your form is not reported as a lead.
One thing you can check today, before the 3.11.0. Open CAPI Suite → Event Log and filter for Lead. If there are rows there, the server side has been working and only the Tag Manager half was missing. If it is empty, the mail-delivery problem above is the likely cause.
(But anyway, 3.11.0 will fix both sides. It will be released -probably- tomorrow)
Thanks again — your question found more than it asked about.
Kind regards
Shan
