Post to the Paminga Form Handler
If you have a non-Paminga form on your website that you do not want to replace with a Paminga Form, but would like to trigger automated actions in Paminga whenever that form is submitted, posting to our Form Handler is a great long-term solution.
The Basics
When a web form is submitted, that form “posts” its submitted values to a URL.
When that "post" is received at the URL, some code reads the values that were submitted in the form, and takes action – like sending an email notifying people that the form was submitted.
But a web developer can easily have that form submission "posted" to more than one URL – they can "post" that form submission to Paminga's "form handler" as well.
Paminga will treat it just like the submission of any Paminga form which means you can trigger any number of automations in Paminga based on submissions of non-Paminga forms.
Use Case
If you have customized or highly complex forms that you do not want to change or replace with a Paminga form, we created this solution for you.
By posting submissions to the Paminga form handler, you can leave your existing forms in place and continue to create more of them as needed, while taking full advantage of Paminga automation capabilities.
Setup
First, you’ll create a Form in Paminga to which you’ll send your form submissions. You do not need to publish this form on your website. It exists only to accept submissions, map submitted values to Paminga standard and custom fields, and trigger automated actions upon submission.
Then, when your non-Paminga form is submitted, post to the Paminga form handler the fields you want Paminga to absorb.
Paminga will:
- See a submission of the Paminga form you created even though the form was never published anywhere
- Create or update a Contact in Paminga
- Track a conversion
- Make an entry in the Activity Stream
- Trigger all actions you’ve chosen on the Form Actions tab
Details
Step 1: Create a form in Paminga
- This form will include all field values in which you would like collect in Paminga
- If you would like to map these fields in Paminga, please choose which fields to map each value to
- Have a custom field on this form you would like to map to Paminga? Create a new Custom Field to catch this data
- Set up any Form Actions would you like to take place when this form is submitted, such as “Modify List Membership” or “Send Autoresponder Email”
Note: You do not have to send over all fields. The only required field is an email address.
Step 2: Change each form field’s Element Name under the Advanced Tab of the Paminga form to match the label for each field from the form on your site.
- Not sure what the field labels are or where to find them?
- Inspect the page on which your form is present. From here, hover over each form field to display their “field-name”
- Once you have the labels for each field, under the Advanced Tab for each form field you would like to track in Paminga, update the Element Name to match the field label from your form
Step 3: Via the Forms URL in Paminga, locate your Form ID.
- This will be placed in the snippet of code to ensure the data from the form is being sent to the appropriate form in Paminga
- You will see this located after the ? in the URL of the form builder when viewing the form.
Step 4: Have your Web Developer add any form fields you would like to send to Paminga the snippet of code.
Below you will find an example code for how to accomplish this. That being said, this example code is not to be taken and used on your website, as we do not know if it will work on your website.
You will need a web developer on your side to review this example and implement the code using whichever syntax/language works with your website. This example is simply a guide for a web developer to understand what they need to do.
When you take this approach, it is also required that a mauuid (the cookie we set) be passed in the form data. We surface an easy function in our tracking beacon that allows you to grab that right in the browser.
<script>
window.onload = function() {
nrformsubmit();
}
function nrformsubmit()
function getMauuid() {
var count = 0;
var id = setInterval(function () {
if (count === 10) {
clearInterval(id);
}
if (window.$__MA !== undefined) {
clearInterval(id);
return $__MA.getVisitorId().v;
}
count++;
}, 30);
}
{
var obj = $__MA.getVisitorId();
var formFields = {
"FirstName": <map to First Name>,
"LastName": <map to Last Name>,
"EmailAddress": <map to Email Address>
"form_id": "enterFormIdHere",
"mauuid": obj.v
}
var form_data = new FormData();
for ( var key in formFields ) {
form_data.append(key, formFields[key]);
}
$.ajax({
url : 'https://apps.net-results.com/data/public/IncomingForm/Ma/submit',
data : form_data,
processData : false,
contentType : false,
type: 'POST'
}).done(function(data){
console.log("completed")
});
}
}
</script>
A Note From our Engineers
This function retries 10 times with a 30-millisecond delay between each try. This gives the web page up to 1/2 a second to finish loading/executing our tracking beacon. This will result in a higher success rate in retrieving the mauuid.
The Paminga Tracking Beacon issues a unique identifier to each visitor. This Javascript-based beacon stores that unique identifier in a 1st party cookie in the browser.
Our Engineers recommend that you:
1. Add a hidden field to your form
2. Retrieve the Paminga unique identifier with the above javascript
3. Set the mauuid that the code will retrieve as the value of that hidden field
By doing this, your back end will receive the mauuid with each form submission. Add this mauuid field to the data you submit to our form handler. Please set the field name to “__mauuid” (please note: there are 2 underscores there).
Step 5: Place the updated snippet with appropriate fields and syntax on your site.
Once in place, any submissions on your site in which this code is present along with the Tracking Beacon will be sent to Paminga.
Again, if any questions arise on this, please reach out to support@paminga.com and a member of our Customer Success Team will be happy to help.
