Pardot Forms vs. Salesforce Web-to-Lead Forms

Salesforce’s Pardot has the versatility to do some amazing things for your marketing campaigns. That’s one reason why VentureBeat singled it out as the fastest growing market automation tool. For example, Pardot is ideal for essential marketing tasks such as organizing your campaigns and building winning profiles. However, many people still remain hazy about the areas where Pardot and Salesforce overlap, especially when it comes to lead generation.

Salesforce customers often ask about the difference between Pardot forms and Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms, and want to know which they should be using in specific cases. While there’s no easy answer to that question, an examination of where each excels can offer some highly valuable insights into better marketing.

Common Uses for Web-to-Lead Forms

Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead forms typically gather data on your website and generate up to 500 new leads each day off of your website. You can create custom lead fields to track special lead information that maps to custom fields in your Salesforce. If a prospect submits contact info through your website, the Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms can automatically send out a personalized email and add it as a new lead in your Salesforce org. One of the most common uses of Web-to-Lead forms is that they can automatically assign leads to certain queues or individual sales agents.

You can even add Web-to-Lead forms onto your Pardot landing pages and other pages that use your Pardot tracking code. In that case, the lead info will go into Salesforce only. Pardot won’t track the information in the Web-to-Lead form, but it will send the site visitor a cookie to track them anonymously across the web.

Pardot’s Advantage with Pardot Forms

Pardot’s real power comes from web analytics it can perform on the data it collects off your website. As stated on the Pardot website –  Pardot Forms are a powerful tool to collect information about visitors and turn anonymous visitors into identified prospects. With Pardot forms you will be able to gather important information about your visitor while providing them an ideal user experience.  When a user submits their information via a Pardot form not only have you collected them as a lead but you have now captured critical data that is linked to that visitor thus allowing you sell and market to them more effectively.  Therefore, when visitors come back to your website Pardot is able to track their activity while adding additional information about that visitor to their contact information inside Pardot and Salesforce.

This opens up a complex discussion and not all your questions can be answered in a blog, but these thoughts should give you a better idea of where to start for your next marketing campaign.