Capture and track visitor using external form without form handler

Question

We are moving away from using Pardot Form Handler because we've noticed that it has become unreliable on our website.

We have a WordPress website that has Gravity Forms for user registration and we're using a Gravity Form to Pardot plugin which sends data to Pardot to register that as a new prospect through API.

But the plugin doesn't support capturing Visitor ID or any cookie data related to the prospect that is why we cannot track prospect when they're on the website.

I've already tried adding the tracking code in the website but still doesn't track anything unless we still use Form Handler URL endpoint.

Is there a workaround to capture website registrant manually as a Pardot visitor/prospect once a Gravity Form User Registration is submitted without the Pardot Form Handler? How does Pardot store cookies and what triggers it to set up a cookie for that specific visitor?

Answer 1

We use Gravity Forms, with the Webhooks plugin (I think it's Premium Gravity Forms) submitting data to the Form Handler in a Kiosk mode.

You should be able to add a little javascript on your form to pull the Pardot Visitor Id cookie. To tie the Visitor to the Prospect, you will need to call the Pardot API with the ProspectId and the VisitorId.

1. Grab Visitor ID
2. Pass visitor Id to back-end
3. Submit Form Handler (back-end)
4. Query Pardot API for Prospect with same email (to get Prospect Id)
5. Associate VisitorId to ProspectId

It can be overwhelming to put this all together. A hack would be to simply redirect the user to a website URL with the "pi_list_email" query param...but that's exposing their email address to potentially a lot of tracker scripts (google doesn't like this either).

I've created code that "wraps" Pardot Form Handlers and takes care of visitor id association (using the steps above) automatically, though it still needs the visitor id to be passed into it (got tired of doing it manually so many times).