Pardot's Lightning Future
Pardot has long felt oddly disconnected from the rest of the Salesforce product family. Recent releases have changed this in a big way.
It's been a big year for Pardot. For a long time, Pardot has seemed like the black sheep of the Salesforce family. It lacks the flexibility of Salesforce's core products, whilst still being too complicated for SMB. It found a successful niche within midsized businesses that don't have complex funnels or advanced localisation capabilities, but was often given away as part of larger deals to enterprises whose needs far exceeded the capability of the product.
The biggest black mark was its weak integration with Salesforce. Eloqua and Marketo have long had significantly better integrations with Sales Cloud than Salesforce's own product. This has often been a significant factor in the decision to use other marketing automation platforms. Which is why Salesforce's efforts to correct this oversight are long overdue.
Campaigns
In June, they announced a new campaign integration between Pardot and Salesforce that they heavily promoted as the deepest ever integration between marketing automation campaigns and Salesforce campaigns. In truth, all the features released in the new integration were already available in either Eloqua or Marketo, just not in both.
Pardot's handling of campaigns has long confused marketers. Pardot follows a strict first touch attribution model, in that prospects must be associated with a Pardot campaign when they enter the system, and they can only be a member of that one campaign. Subsequent touches can be registered in Salesforce, because Pardot has long had the ability to create campaign associations in Salesforce. However, these have been distinct from Pardot campaigns. The new capability doesn't entirely bring the two types of campaigns together, the two types of campaign can be synced but Pardot campaign membership will not sync to Salesforce, although campaign details will. You will still need to make the Salesforce campaign association as well. It is just that salesforce campaign membership will now be visible, editable and reportable in Pardot as well as Salesforce.
Pardot campaigns will still exist, but will no longer be a primary reporting unit. They will fulfil the same function as Marketo's acquisition campaign concept, in that they record the source of the prospect. However, marketers that want to report on the full campaign history will ignore them and use Salesforce campaigns for reporting instead.
Marketing Analytics
The other big new innovation with Pardot, is their integration with Salesforce Einstein Analytics. Analytics has long been the biggest weakness across the marketing automation platforms, and all vendors are taking steps to address it. For Salesforce, this means building a B2B Marketing Analytics app within their existing Einstein BI tools. This app uses their Einstein analytics BI tools to combine Salesforce and Pardot data into a single set of dashboards. In doing so, it works around the fact that Pardot reporting is limited, with major gaps in feature set and little scope for customisation. In particular, ROI and attribution reporting is pretty much non-existent in Pardot, whereas these dashboards are explicitly designed for revenue reporting.
It's not a new capability though, B2B Marketing Analytics was first released in 2016 as an add-on. Last month, it was added into this plus and advanced editions of Pardot as part of the package so is now available to many more Pardot customers for free. Marketo and Eloqua do have limited ROI reporting built-in to their platforms, with extra options available as add-ons particularly on the Marketo side. However, these do not have the native Salesforce integration component, so are harder to setup and are not as comprehensive. Integrated reporting is one of the major challenges marketers of all types face, and this promises to help Pardot customers in addressing the issue.
Engagement History
It's not just Salesforce Einstein users that benefit from improved reporting. The new campaign integration enables another new feature, that is truly unique - the ability to report on the full Pardot engagement history for all campaigns and assets directly within Salesforce using Salesforce's native reporting tools. This is a component of the Pardot Lightning App for Salesforce, which is the lightning version of Pardot's sales enablement tool. The new beta for the app pulls in all of Pardot's asset and engagement data directly into Salesforce, rather than just providing a window into the Pardot database. This allows campaign and asset statistics to be reported on using Salesforce reports, rather than Pardot reports.
Eloqua does this already to a degree with the ability to create Salesforce activity records when contacts perform a tracked action, but this is of limited use for reporting. Pardot takes this to the next level by creating a record in Salesforce for each asset with all the key metrics for that asset, and allowing them to be used Salesforce reports and dashboards.
In theory, this means that there is no need to run any reporting within Pardot at all. All activity and operational reporting can be conducted within Salesforce.
Matched Leads
Perhaps the coolest new feature is also in the new Lightning App for Sales Cloud. Pardot is being used to enable Lead to Account Matching within Salesforce. The new app adds a Matched Leads to the Salesforce Account screen, which displays all lead records for that account. This is extremely useful in an ABM strategy, as it allows account owners to view and convert any leads created for their account, even if there is no link between the lead and the account. The only downside is that there is no automatic conversion for this feature, and no method for changing the matching algorithim.