Let’s start with what it’s not! The most common misconception is that Pardot is just an email tool, but this couldn’t be further from the truth - in reality, it’s a powerful and comprehensive Marketing Automation solution.
Pardot’s strengths are in its Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing capabilities. It’s is one of the leading solutions for B2B Marketers to attract, nurture, convert, retain and upsell to their target market, and is in the Leader quadrant in the G2 Grid® for Marketing Automation Software.
Pardot is used across the world, and its interface is available in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. Pardot tracking code is live on over 30,000 websites according to Builtwith.
Many organisations use Pardot as their central point for Marketing tracking, including bringing in prospect interactions from across the digital marketing mix, including integrating with Google Adwords, Events and Webinar tools and social media platforms.
Marketing Automation is a type of software platform which enables organisations to track and control marketing touchpoints right across the buying cycle, from the first click on your website as an anonymous visitor, right through to onboarding and retention. In summary, Marketing Automation is a single tool which replaces disparate stacks of siloed Marketing Technologies such as web forms, landing pages and email sending, to build a 360 degree view of the customer in one system and achieve revenue goals.
One of the core pillars of Marketing Automation Platforms is the capability to deliver personalised email marketing programmes to the right decision makers at the right time. In fact, according to a McKinsey & Co study, email marketing is still 40 times more effective at reaching your target client than Twitter or Facebook.
Pardot was founded in 2006 by former Duke University classmates Adam Blitzer and David Cummings as a SMB alternative to Eloqua for Marketing Automation. Whilst their company was called Pardot, the product itself was originally called “Prospect Insight”, which is where the “pi” subdomain to log into Pardot at pi.pardot.com originates from. The term ‘Prospect’ continues to be used today in Pardot, in reference to a record in the database, which could be either a potential customer or an existing customer.
The name Pardot is a verb from the Latvian language and means “to market” or “to sell.” You may also hear the word pronounced a number of different ways depending on where you are in the world, including “Par-DOT” or “Par-DOUGH”. However, if you ask the official Pardot team, they’ll point you toward “Par-DOT” as the ‘correct’ pronounciation.
Pardot was acquired in late 2012 by Salesforce, at a time when Salesforce was looking to ramp up its marketing competencies - they went on to also purchase Marketing Cloud in 2013 to cover the B2C/Enterprise side of the market.
High quality Leads - One of the biggest pain points for most B2B Marketing teams is the challenge of meeting the demands of Sales teams for Leads which are ready to buy. Pardot’s Lead Qualification tools, including Lead Scoring and Grading, ensure that you can pass across only the Prospects which fit your ideal customer persona, and with which your marketing has created meaningful connections.
Marketing Campaign ROI Measurement - Pardot’s powerful reporting offers marketers the ability to easily track campaign performance and their impact on the sales pipeline. Pardot’s reporting centers on giving full visibility of the return on investment of your marketing initiatives from a first touchpoint perspective, i.e. how many prospects you drive to the top of the Sales Funnel. Pardot’s strong integration with Salesforce enables multi-touch attribution using Salesforce Campaign Reports.
Einstein AI - Pardot Einstein introduces the power of Artificial Intelligence to the Marketing Department. The Lead Management capabilities of Pardot Einstein give insights into Lead prioritisation through Einstein Lead Score and Einstein Behaviour Score, tell your reps which Prospects are similar to successfully closed clients, and which Prospects are demonstrating behaviour which indicates they’re ready to buy. Pardot Campaign Insights provides AI-driven feedback on the performance of your marketing campaigns, and marketing effectiveness, either around the engagement with a particular initiative, or segment-specific insights.
Email Marketing - This is a core module, which provides functionality through List Emails (sent to a defined list of recipients), Autoresponders (automatically sent to prospects when they complete certain actions), and One-to-One emails (enabling Sales to send tracked and personalised messages through Salesforce).
Engagement Studio - Pardot’s ‘star’ feature to send prospects on automated lead nurturing journeys based on what we know about a prospect and send them targeted messages based on what we know about them, and how they interact with our emails and landing pages. Engagement Studio can be used for Lead nurture, onboarding, event invites, renewals, churn prevention and much more to amplify marketing efforts.
Forms - A vital element of Marketing Automation is being able to capture web form submissions from prospects, either to generate new leads, or to enhance what we know about existing Leads or Customers with Progressive Profiling, to capture more information about records in our database as they complete multiple web forms, for example when they register for events or webinars, request information, or download white papers.
Landing Pages - Many Pardot users already have a CMS to manage their own website, however find that launching campaign-specific landing pages with different layouts and modules can be difficult. Pardot’s Landing Page builder enables you to quickly launch branded webpages for your campaigns based on predefined responsive templates without needing a Web developer on hand.
Segmentation - an important part of using Pardot is sending the right messages to the right recipients at the right time. Pardot includes two main types of segmentation through its Static List and Dynamic List features. Static Lists are typically built through behavioural triggers, such as the completion of forms, or clicks on certain links, or manually by a Pardot user. Dynamic Lists are a segmentation superstar, being built automatically by Pardot based on rule-based criteria for which prospects should be targeted based on what we know about them, even bringing in Lead and Contact information from Sales Cloud - this enables highly targeted email campaigns.
Personalisation - A study by Experian showed that personalised messaging improves email transaction rates by 6x (https://www.experianplc.com/media/news/2014/experian-marketing-services-study-finds-personalized-emails-generate-six/), and it’s simple to do this in Pardot by referencing field values from your prospect records using Handlebars Merge Fields in email templates, list and one-to-one emails, dynamic content, landing pages, forms, and user signatures. A more advanced form of personalisation, Dynamic Content, enables marketers to have smarter engagement with prospects by replacing whole blocks of HTML in emails, forms, landing pages, and even your own website based on what information you hold in your prospect database.
Automation - Wouldn’t it be great if some marketing tasks could be automated to let your team focus on work which really moves the needle? Pardot includes several automation tools which help your team including Automation Rules and Segmentation Rules which automate field value changes, facilitate Lead grading and assignment, and list membership. Page Actions enable automations based on specific pages having been visited, and Completion Actions provide action-based automations from email engagement, form submissions, file downloads and link clicks.
Marketing Assets - To streamline the build of campaigns, Pardot enables you to design elements such as images, and downloadable files such as fact sheets and pdfs for use in your emails, landing pages and your own website. What’s more, you can track who downloaded the assets and even apply automations to change their Prospect Score or send them to sales.
Social Posting - Pardot also includes a social media posting tool, so that marketers can post to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn directly from Pardot, using automatically tracked links to give visibility of which prospects engage with specific posts.
Whilst Pardot was originally designed and targeted at the SMB market, in recent years, the tool has grown and had several enhancements to enable it to be a full solution for marketing communications and compete at the enterprise level. Here are some indicators that you should consider exploring Pardot:
B2B organisations - There are a handful of customers using Pardot for B2C applications, but Pardot’s features around nurturing and intelligent Lead routing much better fit a B2B use case.
Those who need better alignment between Sales & Marketing - Pardot is an ideal solution to empower Sales teams to have the right conversations with potential customers at the right time. Sales Users will also love the abilities included with Salesforce Engage, including 1-to-1 tracked emails and real time alerts for Leads.
Long sales cycles / Complex Sales processes - Pardot is generally better aligned to organisations which have higher thresholds for Lead qualification, such as companies with slow or complex sales cycles. This makes the most of Pardot’s capabilities to convert a website visitor to an Identified Prospect, then gather more information about the Prospect through Progressive Profiling, which feeds into your scoring and grading setup to effectively pass highly qualified Leads to Sales departments.
There’s no shortage of competing products in the Marketing automation space, however some of the most common alternatives to Pardot are:
Eloqua offers a higher degree of complexity and flexibility compared to Pardot. It also benefits from more comprehensive Landing Page and Microsite functionality. The platform better fits B2B enterprise clients with higher implementation and support budgets. It does come at a higher price tag - so it’s a careful decision to make as to whether the greatly increased cost is worthwhile for a relatively few extra capabilities.
It’s not the biggest piece of the puzzle, but an often-heard complaint about Marketo is that it feels like a step back from Pardot in terms of user interface. That being said, Marketo’s reporting tools have been seen as superior to Pardot, however the gap is closing thanks to Pardot’s B2B Marketing Analytics, an Einstein Analytics app for B2B Marketing. Both systems offer strong email marketing capabilities
Salesforce’s own Marketing Cloud solution, whilst typically geared towards the Enterprise B2C / Ecommerce space, can also be used in a B2B context. Both Marketing Cloud and Pardot can be used in the same organisations too, either in different divisions of the same business, or as part of one overall “Lead to life” process, whereby Pardot handles Lead Acquisition, Nurturing, Scoring and Assignment, and Marketing Cloud takes over the multichannel customer journey and notifications for existing clients. Marketing Cloud is overall seen as a more functionally rich, yet costlier solution, with a greater overhead in terms of technical setup and maintenance.
Another B2B SMB tool is Hubspot. Comparatively, Hubspot offers lower pricing and a free, bundled CRM platform. Hubspot also offers a CMS tool to host a full website rather than Pardot’s offering of campaign-specific landing pages. Pardot is better aligned to organisations already using Sales Cloud, whereas Hubspot is a cheaper option for smaller companies looking to avoid the Salesforce stack altogether.
I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say:
Business Units in Pardot are really tricky to wrap your head around.
Or, are they?
Well, it turns out that we can break down implementing this new feature into a guide of easily-repeatable steps, so you can follow our standard process to get up and running quickly.
All the answers you need can be found within this article.
Multiple Business Units in Pardot is a feature which enables you to partition your prospect database and your marketing assets into different divisions, typically for varying geographical or brand splits within your organisation. This is particularly valuable in terms of marketing governance for large companies with regulatory requirements in terms of data processing and storage, such as in the healthcare or financial services industries.
In terms of comparing a Business Unit versus a regular Pardot org, the difference is tiny. A Business Unit has all the capabilities of a regular Pardot instance. The functionality available to your business units is determined by your Pardot subscription tier.
The real impact of business units is more from an administration perspective. Considering that some large enterprise organisations could be implementing 20+ business units at once, an entirely new administration interface has been introduced to help your organisation simplify setup and configuration.
Business Units are only available in the Pardot Lightning App and for users of Pardot Advanced Edition, so any legacy users of old Pardot tiers will need to upgrade their license type before purchasing Business Units.
With most new functionality in Pardot, there are new entries into the Knowledgebase, with the more complex features receiving PDF enablement guides.
At the time of writing, we’re left with just a couple of short Knowledgebase articles around considerations for managing Business Units and configuring Marketing Data Sharing Rules.
Satisfied? No, neither were we, so we’ve put this guide together after working our way through a couple of implementations and bringing together all the information we can find.
Let me explain…
Of course, it’s not a new challenge for large/enterprise level companies to need to split their database into multiple different Pardot orgs. We’ve worked on many projects in the past where multiple Pardot orgs are connected to one Salesforce instance. Whilst this does incur extra licensing costs for the extra Pardot org(s), it provides a great deal more flexibility in terms of targeting the right prospects with the right communications.
Once multiple Pardot orgs were provisioned, each org would need to have a corresponding Salesforce-Pardot connector user created within Salesforce. Because Pardot accesses Salesforce with a username and login just like a regular Salesforce user, it was possible to restrict those permissions for each connector user, to allow each connector (and therefore each Pardot instance) to only see the desired part of your Salesforce database. You can read more about the legacy method of restricting Pardot’s record visibility here.
But controlling record visibility wasn’t the only benefit…
Having separate Pardot orgs also allowed administrators to stop marketers from accidentally using the wrong templates. Because nobody wants to send out a communication to your Italian customers with a link to the Spanish Email Preference Center, right? Okay, old Ultimate Edition customers (equivalent to Advanced Edition) could also do this, but only at the expense of the top tier Pardot package.
Business Units were introduced to provide all the functionality above, including restricting prospect and marketing asset visibility to specific divisions of your organisation.
However, the extra advantage of using Business Units is that they provide an entirely new, simplified administrator interface (see the next section below) in order to reduce implementation complexity and time.
Sounds like progress, right? But that’s not all…
The other great impact of Business Units is that they use the brand new snappily named Salesforce-Pardot Connector v2. This resolves an old customer pet annoyance that if you wanted Pardot to have its own user account rather than sharing with a member of your team for visibility/auditing purposes, you would need to use a real, paid Salesforce user license, further adding to the expense of your new, shiny Marketing Automation platform.
The v2 connector uses a free license for the connector, and best of all, Pardot does all the hard work setting it up automatically for you behind the scenes. This means that you don’t need to create the user, set it up and link it manually.
Before you even think about configuring your Business Units, you’ll need to purchase them! Get in touch with your Salesforce Account Executive and ask about the pricing and upgrade paths. For example, Business Units are only available to Pardot Advanced Edition customers using the Lightning interface.
New Business Units are provisioned directly from within the Pardot Setup Assistant inside Salesforce.
Navigate to:
Salesforce > Setup > Platform Tools > Pardot > Pardot Account Setup
When a new Business Unit is created, a Salesforce connector is automatically created in a paused state. By default, this connector can access all data in your Salesforce org, so do ensure that you limit the data which it can see before unpausing the connector. For example, if you have just provisioned a Business Unit for your USA team, ensure that the connector’s permissions only allow it to see USA data in Salesforce.
The table below outlines how to control the connector’s ability to sync different Salesforce records:
| Object | How to control which business unit can sync the object’s records |
|---|---|
| Leads | Marketing Data Sharing rules / Salesforce connector permissions |
| Contacts | Marketing Data Sharing rules / Salesforce connector permissions |
| Opportunities | Marketing Data Sharing rules / Salesforce connector permissions |
| Custom Objects | Marketing Data Sharing rules / Salesforce connector permissions |
| Users | Profiles in Salesforce User Sync |
| Campaigns | Campaign Record Types in Connected Campaign Configuration |
Notes:
The records which sync between Salesforce and each Pardot Business Unit can be defined using the Marketing Data Sharing functionality.
Next, let’s define which leads, contacts, opportunities and custom object records your business units can see.
The rules we can create are very rigid. We can only create one rule per object, and this rule must use an equal operator and be based on a field which belongs to the object and is writable. We can’t create rules based on Pardot fields or fields mapped to Pardot.
By default, if we don’t create a rule, the object’s sync settings will be based on the connector user’s permissions. After creating a rule, both the connector user’s sync settings AND the rule are taken into account in terms of which records the BU can see. When a Salesforce record no longer meets the criteria to sync, the linked Pardot prospect is sent to the recycle bin.
Marketing Data Sharing rules cannot be created for Leads but not Contacts, or Contacts but not leads. If rules are created for one, they must be used for both. This applies across all business units. So even if only one business unit uses them, they all must.
Marketing Data Sharing Rules are found in the Pardot Settings tab in the Lightning App.
So we’ve already mentioned that your new Business Unit uses the Salesforce Connector v2, meaning that all the hard work creating and linking the connector between Salesforce and Pardot is already done for you.
However, there is still a role for you to play! Once you’ve completed the previous step on defining the sync settings with Marketing Data Sharing Rules, you’ll still need to flip the switch on enabling the sync between Salesforce and your new Business Unit(s).
Navigate to:
Salesforce > Pardot Lightning App > Pardot Settings > Connectors
Note: Ensure you’re logged into Salesforce as a user with Pardot Administrator access on the Business Unit you wish to start syncing. If not, log out and log back in as a user with the Pardot Admin role. Remember that you will need to repeat the steps above for each of your Business Units by logging in as the Admin for each Business Unit.
Admins and multiple-region marketing managers may need to switch between different Business Units. To do this, the User must have a User record in more than one business unit they need access to.
Navigate to:
Salesforce > Pardot Lightning App > Pardot Settings > Account Settings
Previously in Pardot, the user’s visibility of data in SF was determined by their Pardot Role. With BUs, the Pardot data they see in SF is determined by their Business Unit’s permissions.
Bear in mind that changing BUs will affect the data shown in Pardot components, e.g. Engagement History and VF pages. This does not affect Leads / Contacts / Campaigns / Reports pages within the Pardot Lightning app as these pull data directly from Salesforce.
Hold on, you’re not done just yet. There are a few other things to think about:
Your website tracking code is one of the most aspects of your Pardot implementation. After all, this is what lets you track the behaviour of your prospects on your website.
If you’ve worked with Pardot tracking codes before, you’ll notice that the script contains an “piAId” and a “piCId”, which represent the Pardot Account ID and the Campaign ID the tracking code pushes visitor information back to.
Problem: each Pardot Business Unit has a different Account ID, meaning that your tracking codes are different across all of your Business Units.
Start by thinking about your websites. Do you have more than one website? Does your website structure closely manage your Business Unit structure? For example, French website, French business unit, German website, German business unit. If so, your tracking code setup should be fairly straightforward, by installing the relevant BU’s tracking code onto each website.
On the other hand, some of your websites may used by prospects in more than one business unit. In this case, you will need to install multiple Pardot tracking codes onto each website.
There’s a neat solution below which can combine multiple tracking codes from multiple Pardot orgs and campaigns into one script. It’s invaluable for rolling out business units:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var piProtocol = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://pi." : “http://cdn.");
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + piProtocol + “pardot.com/pi.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!—
piAId = ‘AccountID1’;
piCId = ‘CampaignID1’;
piTracker();
piAId = ‘AccountID2’;
piCId = ‘CampaignID2’;
piTracker();
-!>
</script>
Credit - Chris Heiden
You can read more about implementing your Pardot website tracking code here.
Reporting is another consideration key to your BU setup. By the nature of splitting your Pardot account into divisions, this means that the reporting functionality available inside Pardot will only provide reports and charts on campaigns and assets such as emails and landing pages from the specific Business Unit the user is logged into.
So how can users bring together data to see the whole picture across their organisation?
The solution is B2B Marketing Analytics (B2B MA), a powerful Analytics solution for Salesforce and Pardot. The reason why this tool works so well for Business Units is that B2B MA pulls Pardot data from Salesforce, so rather than pointing at one particular BU, it can access all the data from all the Business Units linked to Salesforce at once.
It’s also got a wealth of other features including neat capabilities for Account Based Marketing (ABM) and support for multiple Campaign Influence Attribution Models which we love!
Tracker Domains in Pardot allow you to share Pardot assets with your prospects with visually appealing branded links, for example, go.yourdomain.com.
Email Sending Domains ensure that your emails sent with Pardot have the correct authentication to avoid getting caught by spam filters.
Both of these features need configuration both in Pardot and on your DNS settings.
Many users will need the same Tracker Domains and Email Sending Domains across your Business Units, meaning that there’s a chance of encountering some duplicate errors for your Domain setup. In this case, Pardot Support should be able to override this and add the same domain to all your business units.
Despite Business Units is now being available for use, there are still some features in development for future releases.
Below’s is a summary of the features we’ve heard about on the grapevine. This is normally the point where Salesforce insert their standard Safe Harbour statement… so don’t make any purchase decisions based on this! :-)
A key consideration at the moment, is that in the current release of Business Units, a Salesforce Lead or Contact will only sync to a Pardot prospect in one BU. If you’d like a particular Lead or Contact to exist in more than one Business Unit, then you must create duplicate Salesforce records, and link the different records to prospects in different Business Units. Hardly the cleanest or most elegant solution! It’s in the pipeline to allow a Lead or Contact to sync with more than one Business Unit.
Personally, I’d be hesitant to create a deluge of duplicate prospects as a temporary solution, knowing that they won’t be necessary for long, and then I’d need to be deleting/merging them before long.
A key feature currently missing from Business Units is the ability to share marketing assets across multiple BUs. Imagine having 20 BUs which all need to use the same email template. At the moment, you’re required to create the template separately in each BU. This becomes exponentially more painful when you realise that one of your images isn’t rendering correctly in Outlook 2003, and you now need to roll out a rendering fix across 20 different Pardot Business Units.
In future, you’ll be able to create a template centrally, then make it available for some or all of your BUs to use. Amazing!
As we’ve already seen, Pardot Business Units is all about simplifying the platform - however the latest implementation guide makes combined Business Unit reporting with B2B Marketing Analytics sound very complex. We’re betting on this becoming a simplified, one-click process down the line - but for now, reach out to a certified Einstein Analytics consultant.
Note: The August ‘19 and Winter ‘20 Pardot releases have not mentioned Pardot Business Units at all - we’re anticipating updates in the next release.
In our opinion, Multiple Business Units is the most significant Pardot update since AMPSEA. Not necessarily in technical terms (AMPSEA and the Salesforce Connector v2 are more impressive), but because of where it positions Pardot in the market. With Business Units, Pardot manages to blur the often-used definition of Pardot as a Small/Medium Business Marketing Automation tool and Marketing Cloud as an Enterprise Marketing Automation tool.
This means that Salesforce can now go to the market with Pardot boasting an out of the box configuration tool capable of delivering for even the largest enterprise customers (see the Amazon case study!)
In terms of implementing Business Units, let’s do a quick recap to build your action plan: