Hi Trailblazers!
I'm working in a Pardot Classic org (pi.pardot.com), testing Landing Pages and Forms carefully — but a few numbers in the analytics just aren't adding up. Would love some experienced eyes on this.
1. Views are lower than Submissions — shouldn't that be impossible?
My Landing Page Report shows: Total Views: 3, Unique Views: 1, Total Submissions: 7, Unique Submissions: 5
Logically, someone has to view a page before submitting on it, so Views should be equal to or higher than Submissions. What's causing this gap?
2. Resubmitting a form keeps increasing the prospect's score — is that expected?
We tested having the same prospect submit a form multiple times, and their score climbed every single time — even though it's not new engagement, just a repeat action. This makes scoring unreliable, since someone could look like a "hot lead" just by resubmitting. Is there a standard fix — a scoring cap, Automation Rule, or something else?
3. Click data on a two-button page doesn't match what we actually did
We have a landing page with two links — "Click Here" and "Contact Us" — to see which one people prefer. But when we tested clicking both ourselves, the recorded clicks and page-open data didn't match our actual actions. Some clicks didn't register, and it wasn't clear which link was clicked. We can't trust this data yet.
4. Could Incognito testing be affecting all of this?
We tested using both normal and Incognito/private browser sessions — could that explain some of the inconsistency, especially on Classic vs. Lightning/Account Engagement?
I've attached a screenshot of my one Landing Page Report. If you've seen this before (or solved it), I'd really appreciate your input — trying to figure out if this is normal Pardot Classic behavior, a tracking limitation, or something in our setup that needs fixing.
Really hoping someone can help me get to the bottom of this — thanks so much in advance!
Hi Akshay - great write-up, and the good news is most of this traces back to one root cause (your #4), with #2 being expected behavior. Taking them in order:
#4 first, because it explains 1 and 3: yes, the Incognito/private testing is absolutely skewing your data. Pardot identifies visitors with a first-party tracking cookie. Incognito starts with no cookie and throws it away when the window closes, so every private session looks like a brand-new anonymous visitor - and view/click tracking is often blocked entirely in private mode (and by ad blockers, Safari ITP, and Do Not Track). Submissions still record because a form post is a hard server hit, but the passive view/click pixels may not fire. That one fact drives most of the weirdness below.
1. Views (3/1) lower than Submissions (7/5): this happens when the view pixel is blocked, or the page is served from cache, while the submission still records. Incognito plus repeated testing is the classic cause. Two other contributors: if you submit the form directly (or via an embedded/iframe form) instead of loading the landing page each time, the submission counts but the landing-page view doesn't; and a cached reload won't always re-fire the view tracker. Test in a normal browser without clearing cookies and the numbers line up much better.
2. Score climbing on every resubmission: that's expected, not a bug. If you're scoring through the form's completion action (adjust score), it fires on every submission. The standard fix is to move that scoring to an Automation Rule instead - Automation Rules match a given prospect only once by default, so points are awarded on the first submission and not again on repeats. (Alternatively, zero out the per-submission points and lean on grading/engagement.) That gives you the 'first real engagement' behavior you're after.
3. Two-button click data not matching: plain HTML links on a landing page aren't reliably attributed on their own. To measure which link people prefer, wrap each one in a Pardot Custom Redirect - each gets its own trackable URL and its own click count, so 'Click Here' vs 'Contact Us' becomes clean and unambiguous. (The same Incognito cookie issue was mangling the association here too.)
For clean testing going forward: use a normal, consistent browser profile, don't clear cookies mid-test, use a dedicated test prospect with a unique email, exclude your internal/team IPs from tracking, and give Pardot a few minutes since activity processing isn't always instant.
Do that and 1, 3, and 4 largely resolve themselves, and 2 becomes a one-time Automation Rule. Hope this helps!
