We are currently struggling to find a good solution for integrating Pardot on our website. Our development team is very adamant on not allowing third party HTML, especially forms, on the website.
However we need to find a solution to this problem. Currently we have been looking at Pardot forms, which is a no go due to HTML insertion, however the form-handlers has CORS issues when using AJAX calls instead of form-posts that pardot reccomends.
This leaves us with the last possible solution which is kiosk-mode / data-entry-mode. If we enable this and post to pardot through our backend server, does that keep all the pardot tracking through the script that we are going to include on our pages?
Yes, they've put you in a difficult spot because you've bought an expensive piece of tech and you're not using a great deal of it's capability. You can submit to form handlers server-side, but you still must use the HTTP post method to do so, and then you have to use kiosk mode because it's the server sending the data and not the actual client. With that method you get no tracking pixel set. The only way to get a tracking cookie set in Pardot is you have to go through Pardot's server in some manner (which you have hopefully set up as a subdomain of your main site). If they want to do a server-side submission of the form, then another way to get the cookie set is for your form to do a redirect to a thank you page through a pardot custom redirect with the variable ?pi_list_email={{email}} appended, where the portion in brackets is dynamically adding the email address captured in the form. This capability is described here. The reason to use a custom redirect is so the email address is not visible in the browser's address bar -- the redirect sends to the destination thank you page. That sets the tracking cookie and shows up in your history as essentially another form fill. You'd have to evaluate how that fits with your cookie consent, however, as that method doesn't necessarily respect third party cookie management.
