What's the best way to collect numerous responses to same form/fields from repeat submissions?

Kim_Wieczner
Level 3

What's the best way to collect numerous responses to same form/fields from repeat submissions?

We are hoping to collect product feedback from customers using a handful of string fields on a marketo form. We want to trigger a summary confirmation email to the submitter (easy) but we also want to collect all of the responses if/when someone fills this out multiple times, ideally in a centralized location for reference and analysis . We have so far been unsuccessful in fulfilling this criteria using a Marketo form and instead have leveraged another form provider to pass the data into a Google sheet. We do not have the appropriate permissions to fill the Google sheet directly from a Marketo form.

Does anyone have recommendations for collecting numerous responses in aggregate, perhaps leveraging a launchpoint partner? Given the arrival of the GDPR, we want to try to only use native Marketo forms.

Kim Burditt
1 REPLY 1
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: What's the best way to collect numerous responses to same form/fields from repeat submissions?

We do not have the appropriate permissions to fill the Google sheet directly from a Marketo form.

Well, you wouldn't be sending directly from the Marketo form, you send the form data to the Sheet via a webhook. It doesn't take any special perms and the whole process is described here: https://blog.teknkl.com/logging-marketo-form-fills-to-a-google-sheet/​.

However, you don't necessarily need to farm this out to Sheets: that's a bit of a crutch, even though I wrote the above blog post! 

The question, though, is what reporting you want to do in your "centralized location."  You can use a webhook-based scripting engine (not a simple webhook, but an engine which you can find on LaunchPoint) to write form data to a Marketo Custom Object, one CO per fillout. API limits aside, this is extraordinarily flexible and truly stores a standalone snapshot of each form post.

However yet again, Marketo's reporting on COs (such as it is) is probably not up to your expectations. Namely, Smart Lists can filter on CO values but aren't designed to display/sort/group values as columns. So you'd end up pulling the COs back out again via the API to crunch the data, which means you might as well...

... pull the native Filled Out Form activities using the Bulk Activity Extract API and parse them. See, the system actually keeps a record (for 90 days) of each individual form fillout and its associated data. So it's already there, it just won't be reportable unless you dive into the Activity Logs offline.