Pardot is a wonderful marketing automation tool that can automate some of the tedious tasks of integrating a website with SalesForce. Integrating a website with Pardot is a multi-stage process that varies from organization to organization. From a high level perspective, every migration involves two primary integration methods: visitor tracking and data collection. This guide to Pardot & WordPress integration will provide you with the steps you need to successfully handle a website integration with ease.
Pardot comes equipped with a full featured analytics tracking tool. From a technical standpoint, the analytics portion of Pardot is quite similar to Google Analytics. You install a tracking script on every page of your website and visitor behavior is tracked using a persistent cookie. Each cookie is associated with a Visitor record, there activities are tracked and stored under the Prospects > Visitors menu in Pardot.
To setup a WordPress site with Pardot visitor tracking install and activate the Pardot plugin, then:
That’s it, your website is now tracking all visitor activity in Pardot. Next, let’s take a look at how to handle the data collection portion of the integration. To do this we’ll be using Pardot forms and Gravity Forms to send information into Pardot from a WordPress website.
Pardot collects information submitted to a website, creating Prospect records.
If you’re planning to integrate Pardot + SalesForce with WordPress I highly suggest using Gravity Forms for advanced form creation. It’s easily the best form building tool available for WordPress, and with the right configuration it can send submitted data right into Pardot without the need for custom programming.
The first step to integrating Pardot with WordPress is to install Gravity Forms and create a form. For the purposes of this example we’ll be working with a basic contact form. For more information on this I suggest checking out the Getting Started section of their documentation.
Once you have a gravity form configured and ready to go you’ll need to create a Form Handler in Pardot. In Pardot, form handlers give us the ability to create our own web forms that submit information to Pardot.
Let’s create our Pardot form handler for use with Gravity Forms:
name
or id
values of your form fields, just make each field logical and easy to remember. We’ll actually handle most of the real mapping within Gravity Forms.https://go.pardot.com/l/XXXXX/2014-04-03/cqty
That’s it, you’re all done with the setup inside of Pardot, the next step is to configure Gravity Forms properly.
Now that we have a form handler setup in Pardot we need to post our Gravity Form submission data to it. To do this you’ll need to:
firstname={Name (First):11.3}&lastname={Name (Last):11.6}&email={Email:3}&country={Country:8}&company={Organization:10}®ion={Region:7}
That’s it, you’re all set. When you submit this Gravity Forms your data will be posted to Pardot, and Pardot will redirect back to your form handler’s success location.