Global forms

[Kelly_Harman]

Moving from Eloqua to Marketo this week. We have a lot of forms for webinars, demos, content pieces. What is best practice for these? Do you put them under programs? Does anyone have examples I can see? how do you best track it all. I would love your tips and your success stories.

thanks for the help!

Kel

[Carey_Picklesi7]

Global forms are generally the way to go, as everyone has said. Here are a few other tips I live by:

1. Make sure you include flow steps in your local campaigns to populate the acquisition program. With global forms, it won't necessarily chose the right acquisition program by default.
2. Include the form type in your form name, such as CONTENT-FORM or DEMO-FORM so that it is clear what the intent of the form is
3. If you plan on embedding the form on your website, it can be very helpful to include the form ID in the name for ease of search and relating it the code on your website. If the embed code is 1568, include that in the name like this CONTENT-FORM-1568

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Kelly,

Firstly, welcome to team purple

Great question to be asking - best practice is absolutely to use global forms wherever feasible as it ensures consistency, accurate capture of all your required data points etc (especially important for managing data privacy requirements!). And, of course, it's more scalable. Global forms should live in Design Studio and I'd recommend naming them very clearly if they have distinct use cases (e.g., if you requirements for a newsletter sign up form are different from a webinar registration form).

Personally I will typically only create a local form if it's a use case which I can be fairly certain is a once-off, and if the form requires specific unique field set up.

One thing to be aware of - if you're using workspaces - while you can share landing page templates and email templates across workspaces, you cannot share global forms. If memory serves me right, I don't think you can clone them across workspaces either. So if two workspaces share the same need for a form, they'll both need a version of that form created in their own workspace.

Ankit is correct that if you edit a global form that's used by multiple landing pages it may require you to re-approve each landing page that utilises that form for changes to take effect (there are some conditions here around how the form is embedded though). But I don't see this as any significant inconvenience, it's pretty easy to view all the landing pages in design studio and re-approve them quickly.

A pretty key example of where using global forms has significant benefits over local forms: GDPR roll out. It's much easier to roll out updates to meet GDPR compliance on one or two global forms than 50+ local forms

Long, but hopefully helps give some food for thought!

[Ankit_Dua]

Hi Kelly, it depends on what your use case is. If you have large number of programs for a specific marketing channel it may make more sense to use a global form.Also, in this case any change done to the form will reflect across the landing pages. but the downside here can be that you'll have to approve all your landing pages that are using that form.

If you're doing a one-off event, or program, then I would recommend to do it locally.

You need to think what suits you the best on the overall perspective.

[Britney_Young1]

You can bulk approve landing pages in Design studio if you have to edit the global form and several landing pages are put into draft state.

[Kelly_Harman]

Okay so if they are everyday landing pages (not part of an event or campaign) they prob shouldn't live in a program? Just trying to set this up the best way the first time.

[Grace_Brebner3]

You probably need to be a little more specific about what you mean by "everyday landing pages". What type of program channel would those pages be associated with? What would their purpose be?

[Kelly_Harman]

We have 7 different newsletter landing pages. 15 Different types of demos - Would all of these need to be under their own program or could they live without a program?

[Grace_Brebner3]

I would probably look to use global forms for these (largely for the reasons outlined in my comment below). That may be:

• 1 global "Newsletter Sign Up" form, and 1 "Demo Sign Up" form (assuming that the fields needed for each type are not the same)
• 1 global form for both use cases (assuming the field requirements are the same for both)

Either would be a much more scalable option than creating 22 forms

[Kelly_Harman]

Yes we are doing a form for each type. I was asking if the landing pages need to live under a program? Maybe thats a dumb question. idk

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Kelly - looping back on this one, if any of the answers in this thread helped solve your issue please feel free to mark that answer as correct so that this thread shows as resolved within community - it'll help out other users who are experiencing similar issues to yours

[Grace_Brebner3]

Right - not a dumb question! That would again then depend on whether there are differences between the landing pages or not (and what those differences are).

Personally I don't really do global landing pages outside of programs. I might have a single "global" landing page that can be accessed through multiple sources, e.g. a content download page linked to from multiple newsletter & nurture emails, but that page would likely still be a single page within a single program rather than in design studios - some people do it differently, but I find it easier to keep track of everything that way.

Say you were talking about 15 different demos for 15 different products - for this I would personally do 15 different landing pages. That might sound like a lot but with Marketo's abilities with tokens & cloning it can be made very quickly - by doing things like having those landing pages based on the same landing page template, creating a "Demo Request" channel on a default program, and setting up a tokenised program template that then made the creation of those individual difference programs + landing pages much easier. But the form on each page would still be the same single global form.

If you want to know more about any of these points there's plenty of resources available in community and around the web that can help with this, plus if you have either external agency or Marketo supporting your implementation, they should know more about these ways of setting things up