Tracking GDPR Consent through Salesforce Pardot Forms

Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B Marketing Automation solution that helps marketers create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. One aspect of the solution is the ability to create forms or landing pages the main purpose of which is to help you turn anonymous visitors into identified prospects however there are many other use cases that they can useful be employed for. In this article we’ll take a look at how Pardot Forms could be used to track GDPR privacy consent.

GDPR tracking is an interesting use of Pardot forms. It allows you to not only track GDPR consent setting changes for your contacts but also to gain and understanding of when and where/why contacts are making these changes across your web properties

This document assumes you are already comfortable with creating Pardot forms. For help on creating a form, check out this help article.

1. Custom Fields

Firstly create three custom fields in Pardot to track opt-in data:

Custom Field Creation For Consent Tracking

Sample of Custom Field Setup

You can choose whether or not to also create Salesforce fields for this and sync them across. Make sure you keep the ‘true’ and ‘false’ values lower case to prevent any issues in syncing.

2. Form view

End User Form View

This is what the form will look like for the prospect when they submit. Notice the check box at the end capturing consent. There is also a link to the privacy policy.

3. Form Fields Setup

In the form field editor, you can see this is just an additional field on the form. Note that there’s no label and don’t make this field required. You can see that the privacy policy link has just been put included directly in the field value text using the following HTML snippet (just replace the text in quotations with the relevant link):

<a href="www.company.com/privacy">Privacy Policy</a>

Setup Screen For Form Creation — Note Use of Progressive Profiling on Company & Job Title Fields

In this example we also see use of progressive profiling on the Company / Title fields. We don’t ask contacts for this information until we have the initial data first keeping our forms and data submissions streamlined. More info on that here.

4. Field edit/build

Create your ‘Confirmed Opt In’ field on the form and hit ‘Load Default Data’. Here a checkbox type for the form field for styling purposes, but as long as it submits the value as ‘true’ other formats can be used. Data format is text. This should not be a required field!

Clear the label field — this ensures it will format with the text to the right of the checkbox, not the left.

5. Form values

Select the ‘Values’ tab. There’ll be two values prepopulated: ‘true’ and ‘false’. Delete the ‘false’ value, and then click the ‘A’ icon next to ‘true’. This will bring up an additional text box, which is where you will include your consent statement and privacy link (if required). The text I’ve used is the following:

I consent to receive marketing communications from Lenoxsoft. <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/eu/company/privacy/"> Privacy Policy</a>

This submits the field value as ‘true’, to keep in line with the standard field values, but displays a different text for the prospect submitting the form. Your values should look as they do below:

The grid icon allows you to automatically assign a profile to a prospect if they select that value, and the plus icon allows you to automatically add prospects to lists if they select it

6. Form completion actions

Finally, navigate to Completion Actions in the form wizard, and create two specific completion actions:

Change prospect custom field > Opt In Date to Submission date
Change prospect custom field > Opt In location to [Asset name]

Consider also including a couple of other useful completion actions: Add to CRM campaign (for attribution) and Add to list (e.g. for nurturing).