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How to Add Placeholder Text Within Pardot Forms

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There’s currently no feature for Pardot forms that allow you to use placeholder text instead of the label text. So, in this tutorial, I will show you how to add a bit of JavaScript to your Pardot forms to use the field labels as placeholders.

Step 1: Add the JavaScript

Navigate to Marketing > Forms > Layout Templates and select the layout you want to add the placeholder text to. Paste this Javascript at the bottom of the form tab and save.

Step 2: Add the CSS

If you want to use placeholder text instead of the form field labels, you will need to add some CSS that will hide the labels on the form.

Navigate to Marketing > Forms > Layout Templates and select the layout you added the JavaScript to. Paste this CSS at the top of the form tab and save.


Questions?

Send them to me via email, send me a tweet @jennamolby, or leave a comment

Author

I'm a Freelance Marketing Operations Consultant With 15 years of experience in Marketing Operations, I’ve worked with a wide range of tools including Salesforce, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot), Marketo, and many other sales and marketing platforms. I help teams optimize their tech stacks, improve processes, and get accurate, actionable reporting. Whether it’s setting up your Marketing Automation Platform, building Salesforce reports, managing lead lifecycles, tracking attribution, or integrating your tech stack, I ensure everything is aligned to drive real results.

67 Comments

  1. Nick Mexal Reply

    Hi Jenna, first off, this is amazing. I’m new to Pardot and this sort of thing is just not my cup of tea. Your blog has been a huge help. Question for you on this solution. Is there a way to customize the font color on the labels? I’m using a transparent field background on a dark-ish browser fill so I’ll like to have the text be white rather than gray (it also matches our website design that way). Is this doable? Or did I miss something obvious? Thanks a million!

  2. Troy Meyer Reply

    Thank you for the quick and helpful tip! Saved me from having to start from scratch and worked perfectly, allowing me to integrate my client’s overall website style into the Pardot forms.

  3. Maeva Traoré Reply

    Hello Jenna,

    I managed to add placeholder text within my Pardot form.
    The problem appears when I add it to my landing page. I don’t have the placeholders anymore.
    Do you know how to fix that?
    Many thanks,

  4. Katy Reply

    Jenna, I thought I’d add that the jquery link needs to be added and this modified version works best for me:

  5. Anna Reply

    Hi Jenna,

    Thank you for this! I tried it but couldn’t get it to work on drop down menus. Do I need to add anything extra?

    • Jenna Molby Post Author

      Hi Anna, Placeholders don’t work for dropdowns. Instead, you need to create a default value for the first value of the dropdown.

    • Jean M

      Hi Jenna, how would you create a default value for the dropdown?

    • Jenna Molby Post Author

      Hi Jean, This is a bit more complicated since I don’t think there’s a way to add a default option in Pardot forms. Feel free to email me at [email protected] with a link to your form and I can show you how it’s done using some Javascript. Thanks!

    • Terry Rourke

      I was able to add a label using the first “blank” value. Edit the form field, on “Values” tab click on the “A” next to the top blank value to show the label, place the field name here and save. Now the blank value at the top will have the value of the field name and be shown.

    • Rhonda Hernandez

      I have everything working great except my dropdowns are not populating with the label. Is there some javascript code you could give me to make this work. Thanks alot…..

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