Zapier Formatter Tool

Oftentimes, you may run into the issue that the format of a date you are sending from Zapier doesn't match the format of your campaign field in Lead Prosper. This article is going to walk you through a few popular instances of when you would need to use the Zapier Formatter Tool.

You may need to use this tool because there's times when you have to change the format of a value before it's sent to your campaign. If your campaign is already live and/or has multiple suppliers or buyers, then changing the format of a value before sending it to your campaign is crucial. In this case, you can't change your campaign field format without having to update all your buyers and informing your suppliers they need to change the format of their fields. This can lead to a lot of back and forth and a lengthy process that could halt the flow of leads.

Use Cases

There's many different ways you can use the Zapier Formatter Tool. This article will walk you through a few of the more popular ways it could be used in tandem with Lead Prosper, using to to format:

Date and Time
Phone Numbers
States

Formatting Date and Time

If your campaign field format is set to receive MM/DD/YYYY but your landing page is sending it like YYYY-MM-DD then any lead sent with this format to your campaign will fail. With the Zapier Formatter Tool, we can take care of this easily.

First, navigate to your Zapier account and go to the Zap you created for your lead traffic. Your Zap could be setup in different ways, but what will be the same for everyone following is you will need to add a new step between the step that sends the lead to Zapier and the step that Zapier sends the lead to Lead Prosper. Once you've added a new step, you want to select Formatter by Zapier. For the Action Event, select Date / Time.

Click "Continue" to configure the formatter. Under the Transform dropdown, select Format. For Input, select the dynamic field that will have the date you want to transform. Then you will want to select the format you want to transform it to under To Format. This format will need to match the format of you Lead Prosper Campaign Field. You can leave To Timezone, From Format, From Timezone blank as they will be autodetected by Zapier. This is needed for instances like Facebook Leads or cases where the date might come in more than one format.

You want to make sure to click Test Step once you're on the next step, once you do, under the Data Out tab it will show you what the format of the new Date / Time looks like after applying the formatter. As long as this matches the format you were applying and are expecting in your Lead Prosper Campaign Field, this step is complete.

The only thing left to do is to re-map the state value in the webhook to Lead Prosper. After re-mapping that value, be sure to send test leads to your Lead Prosper campaign to make sure the correct value is being sent before going live.

Formatting Phone Numbers

If your campaign field format is set to receive 6503271100 but your landing page is sending it like +1(650) 327-1100 then any lead sent with this format to your campaign will fail. With the Zapier Formatter Tool, we can take care of this easily.

Click Continue to configure the formatter. Under Transform select Phone Number. For Input, select the field in Zapier that has the dynamic phone number. To Format is going to be the Format you want to transform to. In this example, we will go from +1(650) 327-1100 to 6503271100. The field Phone Number Country Code will need to match whichever country the phone numbers are originating from. The Validate Phone Number field will need to be set to No when testing and once you are done testing, you can change it to Yes to validate phone numbers for you.

Important: when setting Validate Phone Number to Yes, Zapier will check if the phone number format is valid for the country code selected (the United States is the default). This is a great way to ensure that the phone comes from a valid area code and carrier, but should not replace your phone validation service, like XVerify, Nexxa, IPQS, Trestle and others, which have different types of validations, at the phone number level. Also, keep in mind, that if their validation fails, the phone will not be formatted and returned as it was received.

Next, click Continue to test the formatter. Click Test Step and once it's done, you should see the new formatted phone number under the Data Out tab. If the format hasn't changed, check the previous step to make sure Validate Phone Number is set to no, otherwise it can fail the phone number you have for the input for various reason.

Formatting States

There may be times where you need to have the long version or the abbreviation of a state, depending on your buyers spec requirements. You can change the format in Zapier, but it requires a bit of setup.

Click Continue to configure the Formatter. For Transform select Lookup Table and for Lookup Key you want to select whichever field you are receiving the State value from.

Now is where we setup the table to transform our data. There's 2 ways we can set this up and it depends on the format you are receiving the state data. The way this will show is if you are receiving the state as it's full name.

We have a field Lookup Table with 2 boxes for different values. Here is where we create our table. In the first box, we want to put the full name of the State. In the second box, we will put the abbreviation of that state.

This table should include all 50 states and their abbreviations. Not including all 50 states could result in the incorrect data being sent to Lead Prosper and causing leads to fail.

After you created the table with all 50 states, click continue to test your table. Click Test Step, and you should see in the Data Out tab the abbreviation for the given state that was inputed.

Conclusion

These are just 3 of the most common use cases for the Formatter tool. There are many other cases where this tool can be helpful, like combining first and last name or splitting the name into first and last, find and replace text and even extract data points from any random text. Learn more about this tool by reading Zapier's Fromatter guide on their website.