Connect Pardot to ON24 with WordPress and Forminator

June 11, 2021
Pardot Integrations, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

ON24 is a leading cloud-based webinar platform that allows you to create, scale, and personalize engaging webinars. Pardot connects to a number of webinar platforms, with native connectors to Webex, ReadyTalk, and GoToWebinar.

So, how would you go about connecting ON24 with Pardot?

In this guide, we will look at how to connect Pardot Form Handlers to ON24 webcasts via Forminator Pro. This tutorial, targeted at developers, will allow you to register people for webinars via your website, preserving your styling and removing the reliance on Pardot landing pages.

Read The DRIP guide for a full run-down of Pardot Webinar Connectors and integrations.

Above: Pardot native webinar connectors. Note that ON24 does not appear here.

How to Integrate Pardot and ON24

ON24 provides a light integration to Pardot, via Tibco Scribe, which allows you to pull live registration and attendance data into Pardot dynamic lists. You need to engage with ON24 support to get the Scribe integration set up.

You can also register people for ON24 webinars via Pardot landing pages. However, if you want to connect Pardot form handlers to ON24, it requires a bit more work. We have done the heavy lifting for you.

This solution uses Forminator Pro, an easy-to-use WordPress form builder, and plugin, and was created by Mat Baxter of EverWonder.

The Solution

There are three key steps to this implementation:

Hook into Forminator’s action after a successful form submission
Format the data
Send the data to ON24.

Important: the below code is edited snippets from our Production implementation and hasn’t been battle-tested, so do not just COPY AND PASTE. Take the time to understand and edit to your specific requirements. This code should be placed within your `functions.php` file. Be careful when adding code to this file. Always test locally or within a staging environment first!

Step 1: hook onto a successful form submission

The first thing to do is hook into the correct Forminator action and check to see if we’re submitting our ON24 signup form:

** NOTE ** In our Production environment we have an ACF Options page that loops over all our Forminator forms and asks for the specific ON24 Event ID and key. This means we can create new forms within Forminator and tie them to specific ON24 events without the need to edit the code above.

Step 2: format the data

We now have access to the submitted user data. Looking at the API documentation for Seamless Registration, we chose to send the following information to ON24 to register a user:

First name
Last name
Email
Company

Knowing this, we also need to know the specific Forminator field names so we can map our submitted data to the above. You can find the field names when editing the form within Forminator:

** NOTE ** We wanted the minimum amount of fields for the easiest user sign-up, but feel free to see what parameters are available with the API and add more. Also, just because you don’t send it to ON24 doesn’t mean you cannot add additional fields. For example, you might want to ask a user some pre-webinar questions.

With the data, we need to send to ON24 and the field names from Forminator we scanned the user-submitted data and mapped the values to an array before sending it to ON24:

Step 3: Send an API request to ON24

We now have everything to send to ON24, well, almost. Be sure to enter your specific Event ID and Key in the variables below:

All the above code does is create a simple `POST` request to ON24, passing the data we’ve collected and logs any errors to our debug log.

This allowed us to build a website landing page for an upcoming webinar.

Summary

And that should do it! Here’s the full code and a quick rundown:

Hook into Forminator’s submission action
Collate our submitted data into an array of ON24 data
Send to ON24 via a `POST` request

Bonus – Use action Scheduler for better user experience

When we initially implemented this we noticed a delay upon form submission. This is because, in the background, we’re running the above code and although it’s not large, sometimes the `POST` request can take longer than we would like. So as a bonus we implemented https://actionscheduler.org/ to post to ON24 after the submission, not delaying the user experience.

The code is similar, however, we need to abstract it out into a function and call a scheduled action when the form is submitted:

Contributor:

Mat Baxter

I am a full-stack web developer with a decade of development and agency experience. Having led projects across nearly every industry vertical, there is not much I haven’t seen. With my logic-first brain, digital marketing experience and business acumen, I use this knowledge and experience to implement any successful project.