For the past year, my marketing team has had the joy of testing half LinkedIn lead gen forms and half Pardot Landing Pages with LinkedIn’s Sponsored Posts.

Let’s revisit our old friend the A/B test.  Because the results surprised us…

LinkedIn Lead Gen 101

If you’ve clicked on a sponsored ad on LinkedIn recently, you may have noticed that the click took you to a form where your information had already been pre-populated prior to form submit.  That’s most likely a Linkedin Lead Gen Form at work.

Or, if the click took you to a much fancier and dynamic landing page, it was more than likely not a LinkedIn lead gen form, but instead a landing page created outside of LinkedIn by a hip & cool marketer.

Where LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms win: Quantity

Here’s a sample of the Linkedin Lead Gen forms we tested:

From a prospect’s user experience perspective, the pre-populated lead gen form can go a few different ways:

1. Wow that’s creepy, how does it already know my email address, and my phone number, oh crazy — and my title!
2. Awesome, great, wonderful — I only had to click twice and not fill out any information to download this handy dandy checklist on how to train my new sales team.
3. Oops, I clicked once to look at the checklist, tried to exit, and fat fingered it to submit the form.  I actually have zero interest in the content — and now a BDR won’t stop calling me, perfect.

In my team’s experience, we saw all of the above happening regularly at a pretty consistent pace, no matter how long we ran our campaign.

The lead gen forms converted at a significantly higher rate compared to other landing pages used in the campaign, with a lower cost per lead.  Another key advantage is the ease of creating the form – it’s quick and easy, simple to duplicate, and all managed with the LinkedIn interface.  

Where Pardot Landing Pages Win: Quality

So, we should all switch our landing pages to LinkedIn Lead Ads?

Not so fast.  Let’s look at the other half of the experiment.

Within a couple of months of testing, we noticed the volume of prospects created was significantly less on Pardot landing pages. The dip in conversions was especially true when a brand-new prospect was viewing your Landing Page (with no pre-population from Pardot).  

But from our initial testing, these prospects have been higher quality and progressed further down the funnel.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms vs. Pardot Landing Pages: Our conclusion, so far

LinkedIn Lead Gen forms seems to be the obvious answer when promoting content through sponsored posts for the high volume of top of funnel leads they will create.

Pardot Landing Pages seem to be the right answer for LinkedIn retargeting campaigns. For example, if you’re promoting a brand-new campaign for a promotional discount and want them to learn more – this is a great fit for a Pardot landing page.  This allows you to use progressive Pardot forms on the landing pages to collect even more data on your already targeted prospect, or know they are ready for bottom of funnel content like a demo or free trial.

(ProTip: retarget audiences from your CRM data and enable lookalike audience within LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, this will lower your CPL as opposed to Landing Pages typically having a higher CPL.)

Another bonus of Pardot Landing Pages is the ability for your UTM parameter tracking to carry through on your form submit on the Pardot Landing Page. With these hidden fields you can track off the click if they then convert on the website – very helpful for proving LinkedIn ROI.

At the end of the day, many variables come into play in digital marketing, and there are always tradeoffs.  Advertising and LinkedIn Sponsored Posts are no different. I highly suggest you try both approaches, A/B test, track everything — and keep an open line of communication with your sales team on which campaigns are producing the higher quality leads or are re-engaging existing prospects.

Original article: LinkedIn Advertising: Using Pardot Landing Pages vs. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post LinkedIn Advertising: Using Pardot Landing Pages vs. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms appeared first on The Spot.

If you have an internal SDR or BDR team and are looking to round robin prospects, you may have learned that Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules don’t make this super easy to do out of the box. Or, it may be more challenging to get configuration changes made in Salesforce if you don’t have full admin access in that system.

My team was looking to do round robin (RR) assignment using Pardot only, but with a few extra requirements:

• Kick off the RR process from multiple forms
• Break RR assignment into industry groups
• Send the prospect an email after a form submit from their assigned user
• Have the ability to customize the first touch email for different sales users

The play-by-play to wow your sales team with round-robin functionality in Pardot

Here’s a basic how-to for what I set up as well as all the moving pieces in Pardot you need along the way.

1. Add all users to Pardot

First things first, you’ll want to make sure all your SDRs/BDRs are users in Pardot.  It’s worth noting that even if they don’t have Salesforce licenses, you can still get them set up with Pardot licenses without paying anything additional or changing your contract.

2. Define the logic for Round Robin Groups

Work with your sales leaders to determine the most effective way to segment your leads.  In my case, we were focused on segmentation by industry.  This example could also be applied by product, geographic area, or to mirror an internal sales team structure – whatever fits your company’s needs.

3. Build groups in Pardot

The example I’ll walk through is for a group for inbound website prospects for Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leads titled, “CRE BDR Round Robin Inbound Group”.

In Pardot, navigate to Admin > User Management > Groups.  Click “Add User Group” and you’ll be prompted to enter some basic details:

Once it is created you will want to add everyone on your BDR team to this group by editing their groups under their Admin >User Management > Users > gear icon “Edit Groups”.

4. Create a list to correspond to your group

Create a list!  Yes, this step is that easy.

As an example, our naming convention was, “CRE BDR Inbound Website Form List – Round Robin”.

5. Use completion actions on forms to feed the list

Attach that list to form(s) that are CRE industry specific. As many forms as you want!

6. Use an automation rule to trigger assignment

Remember that list from step 4?  This is where that comes in.  Create an automation rule with the criteria in the screenshot below.

This is an important process, so we elected to run the rule in real time.

7. Build an Engagement Studio Program for the notification

Once prospects were RR’ed, we wanted to create a Salesforce task for each BDR and send out that first email on behalf of a BDR.  We built this in Engagement Studio:

You’ll need to use that list you created in Step #4 again – this will be your recipient list. I also always add suppressions for active clients, MQLs, SQLS, etc.

The first action in our ESP is “Assign to Group.” Is this redundant with step 6? Maybe. But we included as a safety net, just in case the automation rules are running slow.

If you have custom emails that are different for team member, the next action should be a rule checking for the “Assigned User”.  I used this because we have Calendly links and other unique content that is specific by BDR.

The next steps should be the email you wish to send and the creating the Salesforce task. Anything else you add is up to you!

As another safety net, I like to get notified if prospects finish the ESP – because it is most likely an existing client, MQL or SQL has filled out a website form.

8. Update as your teams change

Look at that, you built a RR in Pardot!

If you ever have a BDR on PTO or leave the company simply remove them as a user from the Group — no need to change any of the pieces!  Leads will stop being assigned to them once they are removed from the group.

Huge thank you to Brittany for sharing this example of leveraging Pardot to its fullest potential!

Do you have a unique use case?  A crazy cool solution that you built?  A problem that needs solving?  Share it here to get featured on The Spot!

Original article: How to Round Robin Prospects in Pardot without Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post How to Round Robin Prospects in Pardot without Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules appeared first on The Spot.