Pardot Progressive Profiling Form Tutorial & Examples

February 2, 2023
Salesforce Ben | The Drip

Progressive Profiling is an out-of-the-box Pardot Form feature. When a prospect returns to a form, only form fields that the prospect has not previously completed will be shown. For example, if we already know a prospect’s job title, the next time they return to the form, we can ask which marketing automation platform they’re using.

Pardot Progressive Profiling is really helpful in enabling you to collect more data from prospects as they continue to engage with you via form submissions – you’re more likely to get a higher form conversion rate because you’re not bombarding the prospect with a long form to complete. This guide will show you how to set up Progressive Profiling in Pardot, and discover how this one advanced Pardot form feature can spice up your forms.

What is Pardot Progressive Profiling?

When a prospect returns to a form, only form fields that the prospect has not previously completed will be shown (that’s unless the field has the “Always display even if previously completed” setting enabled).

If you’re running recurring events such as monthly webinars, meaning that prospects are coming back to register over and over, it’s likely that they will just see the email field.

Enter Progressive Profiling, enabling you to display form fields based on what data the prospect has already completed previously.

How to Set up Pardot Progressive Profiling

In our example, if we already know a prospect’s job title, the next time they return to the form, we want to ask which marketing automation platform they’re using.

To set up Progressive Profiling in Pardot:

Click to edit the field you want to make conditional.
Go to the Progressive tab, and add the fields that need to be first completed before this field is displayed.

This is how the example above looks in Pardot. The purple box indicates the fields they will see initially. Once the prospect has completed their job title, the field highlighted orange will display:

Note that there’s a (c) next to the field name, which stands for “conditional”.

Progressive Profiling – Examples

Time for more progressive profiling examples. Below, we’re editing the company size field. We’re saying, “if there is information in the first name field, then show the company size field”.

When planning out progressive profiling, before you edit your Pardot, you may find it useful to create a table with the controlling and conditional fields. Here are more examples of progressive profiling that we see work well with our clients:

If the prospect has already filled in:	Then show instead:
First Name	Last Name
Last Name	Job Title
Job Title	Company
Company	Phone Number
Phone Number	Company Size
Company Size	Industry
Industry	Location*

*If your leads are routed based on city/State, use this field in preparation to send this lead to sales.

Summary

Create your own table and fill in your examples – let us know what works well for you! If you need help with your Pardot forms, feel free to reach out to us here for a complimentary consult, we’d love to help!

This Pardot article written by: