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January 5, 2016
Question

iframe forms into Wordpress?

  • January 5, 2016
  • 6 replies
  • 6547 views

How do I iframe a marketo form into Wordpress?

I would like to skip the landing page and put a Marketo form directly on our website.  Our consultant said that we would use an iframe. I haven't used one on our wordpress site before as our web dev said sometimes they don't play together well.

How do I put the form in and where do I find the embed code?

What advice could you offer on iframes?

Thanks

Carol

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6 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
January 5, 2016

Hi Carol,

iFrame it the worst way of doing this and should be chosen once all other solutions have been investigated.

  1. There are some wordpress modules that handle Marketo form integration.
  2. You also can embed Marketo forms. (go to the form, then "form actions -> embed form"

If you really want to use an iframe, simply create a new landing page with a blank template and put the form at coordinates 0-0 (top left).

-Greg

January 6, 2016

My team is interested in iFrame over embedded because of this graphic: revenuepulse.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Marketo-Forms-Table-4.jpg  that shows more functionality is available from iFrame. Is this graphic wrong / out of date? Does embed offer more functionality than the graphic implies?

Kenny_Elkington
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
January 6, 2016

This chart was never correct.  Using embed code allows you to hide the form if the visitor is known and can be used in the fills out form trigger/filter.  Prefill is not available for embed code though, and neither are conversion stats from the landing page performance report.

Kenny_Elkington
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
January 5, 2016

My advice would be to avoid the use of iframed forms.  They are generally more difficult to make look nice, and offer nothing over the standard form embed code other than form prefill.  You can find the normal embed code by following these directions: Embed a Form on Your Website - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Level 7
January 17, 2016

Hey Kenny,

Other than styling, which will require coding regardless of if its in an iFrame or not to truly match the parent page exactly, what is the hesitation to the iFrame method? I am curious...

Prefill is a pretty major feature requirement for forms IMO, and the fact that you cannot use the webpage constraint on the fills out form trigger will have some big implications to the setup of forms and number of forms required in Marketo.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
January 17, 2016

Prefill is a pretty major feature requirement for forms IMO

For some, yes. In many cases, for legal reasons, it's strictly forbidden, so it isn't missed!

Nevertheless since last August I've been mentioning that I developed a cool workaround, which I even demoed at our local MUG.  Almost no one has pinged me back to show interest. This leads me to think it isn't really as major as it seems (I've responded on threads that were opened to complain about it and the OP hasn't contacted me!).

I'm sure people underestimate the inherent security risks (which my workaround doesn't share) if embedded forms were only tweaked to enable prefill (as in: that's the only change made to the code).  Let's see how awesome that would be for the owner of Malice, Inc:

  • add YourCo's Munchkin code, generating a fresh 1st-party cookie
  • get the lead's email address with a friendly form
  • post the form to YourCo's Marketo instance, associating the cookie
  • embed one of YourCo's forms, hidden of course, and grab any prefilled fields
  • post the prefilled fields to Malice's db

Granted, this process can be simulated now with the assistance of server-side code (which is kind of why prefill makes me feel icky even now).  But being able to do this solely client-side makes this abuse much harder to catch.  You're essentially having leads hack themselves: all the actions are originating from the lead's machine, as opposed to from an intermediate server.  Of course there's still a server out there collecting the data, but that could be just putting stuff on a DMCA-protected Pastebin type site.

So you need to do more than simply letting lead data flow offsite, you need measures like origin verification against a user-maintained list of allowed domains (the same thing that could be done with Munchkin, but hasn't yet).

But before "prefill everywhere," what I'd rather have is the option for more secure self-service.  A passcode -- maybe just a 4-digit PIN, we don't need to approach this with ultimate seriousness, and anything is better than nothing -- required for reads and writes, and email confirmation before a lead is activated.  I know for most marketers this would seem punitive, but I also come from the financial sector where even salespeople get creeped out by unauthenticated self-service. The counterargument is made that if the data is considered updateable by the lead, by definition it isn't a corporate secret.  That's true: if I let somebody view and modify "their" age and annual income, it's not like I'm leaking the lead scoring that goes along with that.  But unless you make sure that you never prefill any PII, you're leaking a combination of data that a lot of malicious people would loooove to get their hands on.

pavel_plachky
Level 5
January 7, 2016

There is a free WordPress plug-in that should provide the pre-fill functionality. See WordPress › Marketo Forms and Tracking « WordPress Plugins

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
January 7, 2016

Sorry, but that plugin is not for professional use. It leaves your Marketo instance open to a simple Denial of Service (DoS) even without malicious use, let alone if someone aggressively attacks you.

Ayan_Talukder
Level 4
January 7, 2016

We currently iframe our forms that are input into a landing page to match the styling of our website with CSS.

If we embed the forms, what would be the best method in pulling in the CSS styling? Would we have to host a CSS xml file and input it on each page?

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
January 7, 2016

When you embed, you can either:

  • Use the Custom CSS feature of form editor (though this is not the best for brand matching over time, and requires each form to be maintained separately)
  • Include CSS in the page as style elements or external stylesheets
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
January 17, 2016

HI All,

So if we had , it would simplify everyone's life, would'nt it ?

-Greg

October 27, 2016

err...I guess this is attempting to be helpful - so I need some help...

I DO want to prefill forms on my website, so until now I thought Iframe was the way to go - in fact the ONLY way to go?

When I mentioned this to the web agency designing the website, they weren't too convinced...they had questions over where on the page the iframe would sit, and how they would be able to control the size of the iframe/forms if we had different sets of fields required for different forms...

I am doing this NOW, so ideas for the future are great - but this will all be done and finished before that functionality comes along I am sure - so I must make a decision now...