by Matt Lincoln 
Social Media websites have been stepping up their efforts to keep visitors browsing directly on their platforms rather than being linked elsewhere. The reason? It’s a simple fact that the longer a visitor is browsing on their platform, the more potential ad revenue which can be generated. Examples of this are News on Facebook and influencer content on LinkedIn Pulse.
With LinkedIn lead gen forms, advertisers are offered the capability to capture prospect details without them having to leave LinkedIn. However, users of Marketing Automation systems such as Pardot need to be fully aware of the implications.
Ideally, Pardot will be ‘fed’ with as much data about prospects as possible, in order to build a holistic view of your interactions with your prospects and their interest in your brand. A key aspect of this is the association of your prospects to a browser when a form is submitted or a tracked link on an email is clicked.
By using LinkedIn forms, you could redirect the prospect to your site after they complete their details, but your marketing automation system would just see the prospect as another anonymous visitor. This means your sales and marketing teams lose out on rich prospect insight.
Ideally, Pardot-tracked forms should be used wherever possible, unless there is a specific requirement, for example registering prospects for a webinar with a provider which doesn’t integrate with Pardot. Fortunately, Pardot provides a range of third party connectors, in order to eliminate this problem in most scenarios.
LinkedIn Tuesday announced several updates to the Lead Gen Forms for Sponsored Content that debuted in April.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms eliminate one of the major obstacles to conversions—relying on users to fill out contact forms, which is even more difficult on mobile devices—by auto-populating an in-application form with information from users’ LinkedIn profiles and allowing them to instantly submit those forms.