LinkedIn Lead Gen forms, Zapier, Pardot, and how it all came together.

I recently started working with a new digital advertising agency based in Hong Kong and they recommended LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms for our paid advertising on the platform. Lead Gen forms are in essence webforms that are tied to sponsored content displayed on news feed. When the user clicks the CTA a form presents itself and upon successful submission the gated content is presented to the user.

LinkedIn provides a list of leads generated through form submission on their advertising platform. if you are running timely marketing automations you will want to bring the data into your automation platform as soon as possible. In the past I’ve seen daily or weekly, manual CSV file transfers between platforms, but this time our goal is a little different and requires more urgency. We’d like to trigger an email send with a link to the gated content to the lead immediately after they complete the Lead Gen form. So there are a couple of ways we we can automate the data flow between the two platforms, we can use Salesforce Sales Cloud’s native LinkedIn Lead Gen form integration that comes out of the box or we can use a middleware like Zapier to connect LinkedIn to Pardot.

Since our email automations run on Pardot it made more sense to use the Zapier approach. This approach was also recommended by LinkedIn’s own solutions architects.

Sales Cloud integration

Before getting into details of the LinkedIn-Zapier-Pardot integration it’s worth noting that Salesforce’s integration offers a bit more straightforward solution to getting the leads in to CRM. Also worth mentioning is that LinkedIn form fields can only connect to the standard lead object in Sales Cloud. Overall set up, field mapping, and testing should take about an hour to complete. If you are working with Salesforce admins they will need to be added to your LinkedIn business page as business managers and given access to the Campaign Manager, or they will need to give you admin rights to do the work yourself.

Back to LinkedIn-Zapier-Pardot integration solution

Here are a few notes before you start down this path.

1. Zapier will not recognize nor connect to certain field types in Pardot like rmulti-selects, dropdowns, radio buttons, or checkboxes. So this brings a challenge if you are using those types of fields in your Lead Gen forms. But there is a workaround which I’ll describe down below*.

2. Zapier connects to a maximum of 200 custom fields in Pardot. This means, if you have 230 custom fields, 30 of those will not be shown in Zapier when you try to map your fields. This is only a problem if your Pardot instance has over that limit and if you are, then you will need to get creative or do some custom field clean up. **

3. You will have to purchase a subscription plan to Zapier to get access to their Pardot and LinkedIn integrations which they consider as “premium” apps. There is no workaround, if you don’t pay then you won’r have access to connecting these two platforms to each other on Zapier.

4. Zapier’s customer support responds to your inquiries in 4-8 hours and I believe they run on Pacific time. This is in case you have a deadline you are running against.

I am hoping my notes above should save you about 2-3 days of your time should you decide to use Zapier as your integration solution.

*Dropdown fields allow us collect data in a structured manner so that we can then later analyze it without having to go through time consuming data clean up operations. Since I can’t directly utilize this type of field, I have to get creative and add another step in my integration using Pardot’s Automation Rules. Automation Rules allow me to leverage a Pardot field’s value then use that to update another field’s value. In an example I' can create this logic in Pardot, if Field A value is “Orange” then change Field B value to “Orange”. This way, I can still bring in my data from Lead Gen form into Pardot in a freeform text field then use the automation to actually update the dropdown field to the corresponding value.

**If you have more than 200 custom prospect fields in Pardot I have two recommendations fo you.

1. Definitely try to clean up and reduce the number of custom fields in Pardot. There is a good chance there are never used or never will be used fields in there that you can either completely delete or recycle.

2. If you can’t delete fields then you need to look at recycling them. In our organization we have 8 fields we named “Catchall #” that are used for random and temporary data holding purposes. In my case I know I won’t be able to reduce the number of fields below 200 so I am going to end up using these catchall fields for my purpose and run the automation rules on 2 of them, not ideal but Zapier didn’t leave another chance.

So to summarize, there are some roadblocks but nothing without a workaround. As with any technology platform I work with there is always a shortcoming where we have to somehow patch and workaround these types of issues. LinkedIn-Zapier-Pardot connection provides more flexibility with running marketing automations compared to Salesforce’s native integration. I would definitely recommend the Zapier approach over that.

If you worked with Pardot, Zapier, and LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms and have a question or suggestion please let me know using the form below.