This article is about the pros and cons of using Pardot Forms and some tips and tricks I’ve learned while I was working with them. If you are looking to find out how to create forms in Pardot and need step-by-step instructions then please proceed to the related page at help.salesforce.com.

One of Pardot’s great features is its forms. If you have a Pardot subscription then you can create Pardot forms and collect lead data on your website or on your Pardot landing pages.

Pardot forms are hosted on Pardot’s own domain, i.e. https://go.pardot.com, and you can embed them on your website using iframes. While iframe implementation is fairly straightforward, you will still need to know some HTML and access to your website’s code. Think of iframes as little windows on your website that display content from another website. That means the form actually lives on Pardot’s domain yet it’s still visible and accessible on your website to your customers. A few things to note here;

• You will run into some cross-domain tracking issues, meaning the cookies set on the Pardot iframe will not be available to your website domain. This is particularly important if you are running paid advertising campaigns and relying on UTM parameters to capture the source of your leads.

• If your users are running some type of ad-blocking software or have high-security settings then iframed forms may not display altogether resulting in lost leads and revenue.

• Additionally, iframes aren’t mobile-friendly in their most basic implementation, you will need some CSS and JS to get that iframe to behave in mobile.

If you are time-crunched and ok with the imperfect implementation or losing 20-30% of your leads, then iframed Pardot Forms may be the right solution for you. If you have some time to build the right solution for your business and if you have someone on your team who knows their way around HTML, CSS, and JS, then a better option for you will be to implement Pardot’s Form Handlers. But that’s a topic for another post.

Now back to Pardot Forms.

When I first started with a client of mine, they had about 80 iframed Pardot forms implemented all over their website. They had 70 or so product offerings and they dedicated a form to each, plus they had other lead capture forms that they collected user data. When they needed to ask a different question on their web forms they had to go through all 80 and update one at a time. This was a maintenance nightmare for admins since the questions changed every time a new department head took office, which was frequent.