Hidden Fields

Hi Erin,
Many times hidden fields are used to capture where a lead came from. For example, someone might want to send different Marketing emails with links to the same form to different groups of people.

By sending custom URLs that populate the hidden field to these different groups, the hidden field can be populated without any input from the customer and the user can know exactly where the lead came from.

Will

To add onto Will's point, this article does a good job of explaining the different options for hidden field use: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000LH7uCAG

Erin - We use this for partner referral codes. By including a hidden field, we don't need to ask the user where they came from when they sign up.

Lots of good reason to use hidden fields from the comments above. 

When you start using hidden fields, keep in mind if you clone a form for use in a different program, you may need to update what's included in those hidden fields. 

We use them to capture URL parameters. That allows us to direct many different traffic sources to the same page. The hidden field captures the URL parameters, and we use a token in the campaign name field on the "Add to Campaign" flow step to pass the lead into the corresponding campaign in SFDC.

Very handy!

We use the hidden field to also capture the specific products and categories they might be interested in.  We offer lot's of different solutions, and this helps us segment our lists.  

I hope you guys don't mind me adding a question on to this - if I want to use a form on Multiple Non-Marketo Landing Pages, am I able to use a hidden field to track what page the form was filled out on?  If so, how would I do this?

Hi all. Fairly new Marketo user here. Question on hidden forms: If we're using them to track product interest, will the value "update" every time the user fills out a new form? Or will it only put in a new value if it was previously empty? Ideally, I'd like to be able to append values to the product interest, so I know the history of what the individual has requested information on. Is there a way to do this?

@Juli

Yes, as long as you're using a Marketo form, you should be able to do this.

When you create a Hidden Field, select it and then go into "field value", from there change "get dynamic value" to "Get value from URL parameter" and select the parameter name (this can be anything you want).

Then, add the parameter to your non-Marketo landing page. Typically, if you use a Marketo landing page, you can use the URL Builder option to build out the URL parameters, but since you're doing this on a non-Marketo LP you will have to manually do this part. Hope that helps.

For example, if your parameter name was "campaign".

Your URL would be http://www.example.com/test.html?campaign=first_campaign

Once someone arives to that page and fills out that form with the hidden field, "first_campaign" will automatically be populated into your campaign field in Marketo and/or whatever other CRM you might be using.
 

Also, keep in mind, you can capture multiple parameters, currently we're tracking about 2 for our latest campaign.

@Molly

Good question, I tried setting up something similar so that we could track a history of values in Salesforce, but wasn't able to. It seems as though everytime someone fills out a new form, the previous information is washed (though it might be stored in their Activity Log). I'm not saying there isn't a way, just that I haven't been able to find one. Hope you get a better answer!