Using other forms in Marketo

[Rachel_Breden]

I am working with my institution's webmaster to set up our site so that people who fill out forms hosted on our server (not Marketo forms) feed into Marketo. We did this successfully (i.e., if someone fills out a form a lead is created in Marketo), but we can't figure out the next step. I'd like to be able to set up a trigger campaign in Marketo for when someone fills out a particular one of these forms, but I don't know how to get our forms to register as a form within Marketo. When I try to set up the trigger and do "Fills out form is..." I don't have the option to select the form hosted on our organization's server. I suspect this is because Marketo does not really recognize it as a form. Any suggestions?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

It's likely to appear as a "Lead is Created" instead of a form fillout. You will need to use the lead is created trigger, with specific constraints using fields that you have in your form.

[Rachel_Breden]

But what if we already have the lead in our system?

[SanfordWhiteman]

But what if we already have the lead in our system?

That is one of the major problems with using a non-Forms 2.0 integration.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I don't know what kind of integration they're using, but the preferred method is to Make a Marketo Form Submission in the background​. It's faster than any other integration, you don't have to maintain any server-side code, you have no practical rate limits or daily usage limits, it will associate Munchkin cookies (critical for analytics!), and you will get a proper Filled Out Form activity.

Any other method pales in comparison.

[Rachel_Breden]

This may work. I will send this to our webmaster (she gets to handle the technical stuff!). Thank you, Sanford!

[Rachel_Breden]

The article you sent uses forms 2 API. My webmaster doesn't think this will work since we use Drupal webforms.

Also, and I may not be understanding this correctly, but it looks as though the article is instructing you to make a form in Marketo that is just a button, then adding the button to the form on our server? But the template we are using doesn't allow us to control the button, so that won't work...???

[SanfordWhiteman]

The article shows creating a new form, but you can in fact use any form that exists in your Marketo instance. And it doesn't need to have only a button, though that helps make it clear (to Marketo admins) that the form isn't intended to be seen by the public. Creating a dedicated form also means the form name will show up distinctly in reports.

What a background form post really is, is a hidden form (no HTML <FORM> is shown to the lead) whose accompanying Marketo Forms 2.0 JavaScript object can be used to add fields and submit the form directly to Marketo. It's suitable for use by Drupal or any other CMS's forms, but your developer needs to pass the values on your Drupal form to the Marketo form object, then call submit(). Typically the Drupal form post would be cancelled, but you could commit the form data to both systems if you wanted.