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How to Add Placeholder Text Within Pardot Forms

1 Min Read

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. Yvette Montague Reply

    Hi Jenna! The code works beautifully, but when I add a checkbox or radio field to the form, it doesn’t display at all. How can I correct to have the radio field display? (Note – I’ve renamed the true value to the label and the actual label field is blank)

    • Jenna Molby Post Author

      Hi Yvette, This shouldn’t impact your checkboxes or radio buttons. Can you send a link to your form to [email protected] and I can help you troubleshoot? Cheers, Jenna

  2. Ramón Reply

    I love you Jenna! Thanks for your awesome ultra-helpful blog. All Pardot Marketers along the world should be indebted with you.
    <3

    • Jenna Molby Post Author

      You’re welcome! Thanks so much for the positive feedback 🙂

  3. Davor Reply

    I pull up the text from the labels and inject to placeholders into a Pardot form. I have used the label to create an option for the select to display a placeholder. Everything goes nice until I make a form with checkboxes and radio buttons.
    Does somebody know how to fix that?

    Thank you in advance 🙂

  5. Loren Polster Reply

    Jenna thank you so much for this incredible script and all the insights you’ve shared. This has worked perfectly and I have a nicely polished form layout template, responsive and ready for use. However, I just realized the script to add placeholder text disables the error messages when someone doesn’t fill in all the required fields. I see the red messages flash for a split second and then they’re gone.

    Any help on how I can fix this? Thanks again for your time and insight.

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