Re: Embedding Marketo forms on Wordpress

Nick_Weirens
Level 2

Hello, apparently you lose auto filling of forms when you embed marketo forms on wordpress, correct? What plugins or connectors do people use to embed forms on wordpress but still keep the auto fill or prefill functionality?

Thanks

38 REPLIES 38
Kevin_Pferdner
Level 2

Sorry - not meant to be an advertisement but mostly just to be helpful. We don't charge for these tools.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Ya, not allowed, though... no links to our own products or email addresses. The idea is you build reputation by solving people's probs, and that in turn can make people seek you out.

On a technical level, you should consider that your plugin (like Grazitti's, and any other server-side plugin like this that I'm aware of) consumes a REST call for each anonymous session, so anyone can trivially break it for the rest of the day -- and break all other integrations across the Marketo instance -- by trickling in at most 1/2 hour of traffic. 

In 2018, everyone must expect attacks on their corporate website; everyone is a target, not just "controversial" sites. Sure, at some scale, a DoS vulnerability will always exist. But that scale shouldn't be a single bad actor with a few minutes to spare. That's why I don't consider these approaches prime-time-ready.

This isn't to say, by the way, that your plugin isn't superior to the other REST-based solutions! But REST isn't the way to do this. Any solution must have as its baseline the same capacity as native Marketo PreFill.

Brooke_Bartos1
Level 6 - Champion Alumni

Hi Nick,

We are using Grazitti Interactive, and their Marketo Wordpress plugin gives us pre-fill functionality for our forms, as well as other personalization tools for our Wordpress site. Their email is info@grazitti.com. We've been using it for close to a year now, so let me know if you have any questions.

Brooke

Nick_Weirens
Level 2

Thank you! Did you happen to check out those other ones like Hoosh or Zaper? What made you go with Grazitti?

Brooke_Bartos1
Level 6 - Champion Alumni

We looked at a few options, but Grazitti was cost-effective and easy to work with, and we have several other pieces of their integration active on our site. 

In addition to form-fill, we've been able to do real-time personalization on our blog for content, images and ads. The plugin also links the blog to Marketo in a way that lets us send a digest email from our own templates just by clicking the articles we want included... so in essentially three clicks I have a perfectly created digest email out the door. Their support has also been great, which has been very helpful.

Nick_Weirens
Level 2

Have you ever heard of (or had) any hacks or attacks when using Grazitti?

Brooke_Bartos1
Level 6 - Champion Alumni

I have not, but I feel like this would be a question they would be comfortable with addressing if you asked them directly. I know I've asked some of our other vendor partners for information about their security standards.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

To hone in directly on the problem area, it's not security as in "exfiltrating private data."  It's a question of uptime under load and collateral damage to other services.

There's no way (I am not exaggerating, there is no way) for an approach that consumes an API call for every anonymous request to bear up under quite minor load. It is mathematically impossible.

Think of it like this, perhaps: there's a fancy sports car, keys in the ignition, gull-wings open, in the parking lot of a high school. 1 whole gallon of gas in the tank. School's out, and cops are all on furlough. Is that a low-risk scenario, day after day?

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

But their solution isn't actually suitable for professional sites (a newbie hacker can break it, and all your other integrations, in half an hour).

That's the difference between something that "works" and something that should be exposed to the public.

Nick_Weirens
Level 2

That is extremely helpful. Thank you

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Hi Nick,

This is a Marketo default behavior that you loose the prefill capabilities when you embed a Marketo form on ANY CMS or web page outside of Marketo Landing Pages.

There are some workaround for this but be careful, some will lead you to incorporate your Marketo REST API key on the front end of your site, create a serious security breach on your data.

I know that Sanford Whiteman​ has some secure solutions for this, though.

-Greg

Nick_Weirens
Level 2

Ok, thank you for the info!

Sanford Whiteman​ can you please let me know what secure solutions you provide?

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Nick Weirens​, if you follow me we can DM about it (we aren't allowed to link from Nation posts).

Sara_Yamamoto3
Level 1

Hi Sanford Whiteman, I'd love to get more info about this as well!

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

About what part?

Sara_Yamamoto3
Level 1

Sanford Whiteman - the secure solutions/workarounds for adding the prefill capabilities on Marketo forms for WordPress.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator
Sara_Yamamoto3
Level 1

Thank you!