What Are Pardot Form Handlers?

What Are Pardot Form Handlers?

So you ask yourself, what are Pardot form handlers and how are they different from Pardot forms?

If you have purchased Pardot but would like to keep your existing website forms to fully control the styling and maybe post the form submission data to more than one database, then a Pardot form handler is for you.

A form handler is a simple way to take data submitted via a third-party form and post it to Pardot. There really is nothing to it.

You can see and compare the benefits of both a Pardot form and a Pardot form handler here.

Before proceeding with creating a form handler though, there are certain considerations that should be taken into account. Please click here for a licensed Salesforce article to find out what these are.

Let’s now go ahead and create a form handler – here is an article that will tell you how to do so.

Important Points to Note:

  • Create identical and matching fields in Pardot that are currently on your website form.
  • When adding the field to the Pardot form handler, the External Field Name is case-sensitive and must be an exact match of that on the website form.
  • The name is specified by the ‘name=’ attribute of the input tag in the HTML of your external form.

Avoiding Sync Errors:

It is worth noting that in any fields on your form where you have controlled values, you need to make sure you have the same value in both Pardot and Salesforce. If you don’t then the record may not be created in Pardot, or if the record already exists when the next sync to Salesforce happens, it will error with a bad ‘Picklist Value’ and become stuck in the sync queue. The same principle will apply to all field types.

Pardot Sync Error Message

Now that the form handler has been created, you will need to take the Pardot form handler code and add it to your website.

From within Pardot, navigate to the form handler and click ‘View form handler code ’ (1), and copy the URL (2) as shown in the image below.

Pardot View Pardot Form Handler Code

In your form’s code, change the post URL to your form handler URL.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now have an idea if you want to continue using your existing forms or move to a Pardot form. Either option is easy to set up.

Lastly, please remember to fully test before setting any changes live so you do not disrupt the day-to-day running of your business.

We hope you enjoyed this article and found the information to be beneficial. If you would like to read more of our articles, then please click here.