Should I use Marketo landing pages or embed forms on my website?

[Anonymous]

Two questions actually 🙂

1) Should I use Marketo landing pages or embed forms on my website? Upside of using Marketo landing pages - it's easy to clone and re-use! Downside - what would happen if we ever stopped using Marketo? We'd have to transfer everything back over to our site? Yikes!

2) For form embeds, do you use iFrames or Javascript? My agency is asking which I prefer and I don't know what the difference is. 

[Josh_Hill13]

Christine,
 

If you form embed, you just take the code from the Form (click the form, then go to the menu for the code). There is no need for iframes (ugh).
 

If the agency wants, they can recreate the form with the API, but I see no reason to do so unless you need fancier functionality.

As for which pages to use, it's up to you. Some companies find it easier to use their website to manage changes to the look and feel. Others would rather use marketo pages.

[Maria_Karlsson1]

I agree that the easiest embed option is to use the code in the form - however this will not include pre-fill of the cookie information from the munchkin tracking which is a shame. if you use landing pages or iframes this can be included as well as progessive profiling. I am hoping Marketo will enable the embed code to include pre-fill function in the future or have a workaround on how to add this.

[Dan_Stevens_]

The link I'm including below is also a useful site for creating variations/extending the basic embed code.  For example, on our site, we use a single form for all of our gated content pages across a variety of campaigns.  All that's required is hard-coding in the proper confirmation/thank-you page that will appear once someone submits the form.  See example #2 on this page: http://developers.marketo.com/documentation/websites/forms-2-0/

[Anonymous]

So we have 4 options?
- form embed code - easiest, no prefill, no progressive profiling
- iframe - includes prefill, no progressive profiling but not desirable per Josh (why?)
- javascript - agency suggested this but dont know yet why/whats difference
- extend basic form embed code?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

@Christine the form embed code is Javascript (though you copy-and-paste it, so you don't need to actually be a JS developer.)

You can also do quite deep customization of the embedded form using custom Javascript and the Forms 2.0 API.

So there really are 3 options: plain-vanilla (JS-based) embed, customized JS embed with event handling and interactions with other parts of the page, or IFRAME.

[Anonymous]

Another option is a simple re POST. We have some fancy forms and upon submission logic is performed and then the form contents are reposted to Marketo. We do lose progressive profiling on those forms, though. The benefit is that these do show up as form submits in Marketo. Note that this solution has been in place before Form 2.0 and we haven't had the opportunity to re-evaluate.