Pardot Spring '19 Release Overview

We're only just into February, but the Salesforce Spring Release is now upon us. The first of this year's three big updates goes live this weekend. It's a big update for Pardot and introduces a critical milestone for the ongoing transition from Classic Experience to Lightning Experience that Salesforce admins need to be aware of. This is also the start of a new release schedule for Pardot, which will be getting two updates in every release window. The major releases will still happen three times a year at the same time as the rest of the platform. However, there will also be three smaller out-of-band releases the first of which was the week before Christmas to coincide with the publication of the release notes for this week's update.

Salesforce Lightning

The big news for Sales Cloud admins is the announcement that from October this year, Lightning will be automatically enabled for all users unless the organisation chooses to opt-out of the upgrade. While there has been a lot of interest in Lightning, adoption in the enterprise space has been slow due to the effort required to convert existing customisations. Given that Classic experience is no longer being developed, the desire to push users towards the new UX is understandable but is deeply unhelpful to overstretched IT and Ops teams that simply don't have the time to redesign their instance to cope with the new UI. The good news for panicking admins is that this automatic upgrade will only apply to users that use one of the standard user profiles. A new Lightning Experience User permission is being added in the current release, this is enabled by default for standard profiles, but disabled by default on custom profiles. Admins have six months to go in and alter this setting before users with the Lightning Experience User permission enabled get switched to the Lightning experience by default in next winter's release. That's assuming, this change doesn’t get delayed, which is definitely possible if pushback is strong enough.

Fortunately, this move is being accompanied by a major upgrade to the Lightning upgrade tools available within Salesforce, there is a new migration area in setup to help validate and migrate customisations to the new UI. This includes enhancements to the help available to both users and admins, as well as upgrades to the Configuration Converter to provide much more granular feedback on Visualforce pages. One update that will be less appreciated is the new Lightning Experience Feedback Form that will be randomly displayed to users using the new UI from March. This is a brief user satisfaction survey intended to collect feedback directly from end users, without the need to go through admins. Naturally, admins are advised to disable this feature on behalf of their users from the newly renamed Adoption Assistance area in Setup.

The buzz pre-release though has mostly been about the new Flow builder that replaces the existing Cloud Flow Designer tool with a streamlined interface for building automated process flows without the need for code. This is an update that has been forced on Salesforce by Adobe's decision to kill Flash next year, but admins are the ultimate beneficiary, as the new Flow Builder is both simpler and far more powerful. If you've used any of Salesforce's workflow build tools you'll be right at home, the resemblance to the Lightning App Builder or Pardot Engagement Studio is obvious. For users, the main benefit is enhanced templating capabilities for workflows build using the new tool. This applies to your own flows as well as those installed from managed packages. In terms of functionality, you can now trigger flows following built-in platform alerts and errors, rather than just custom ones. These are used by Einstein for its follow-up actions recommendations engine, so are far more useful than they used to be. There have also been some significant enhancements to the scheduling capabilities, allowing Flows to be run in real-time and to be used for building integrations with external objects.

Pardot Einstein

Announced to great fanfare last spring, Pardot gets its AI refresh with the launch of Einstein powered behavioural scoring and campaign insights. While built-in predictive lead scoring and report summaries sound revolutionary, these are in fact extensions of existing Sales Cloud features to Pardot. As such, they only work for Pardot Prospects that are synced with Sales Leads. To take advantage of the predictive capabilities, Pardot users will need to have the relevant Sales Cloud Einstein features configured in their organisation. The scores and recommendations produced by these predictive features will then be displayed in Pardot for Lightning and in Pardot prospect lists. Given the lightning dependencies, users will need to be using the Sales Cloud Lightning Experience to take maximum advantage of these capabilities.

Pardot Lightning

The Salesforce Integration enhancements in this release will prove far more critical to the future of the platform than Einstein. Pardot has always struggled in an enterprise context with its limited Salesforce connector, that contains some unexpected gotchas to make life difficult. This release fixes some of them with a new connector setup wizard that can be run from within Salesforce. For now, this connector is only available for new customers. Expect that to change in a future release as there are several new capabilities with this connector that would be useful to all Pardot customers. In an enterprise context, the most useful is the ability to connect multiple Pardot instances natively to a single Salesforce instance. This has always been possible but required support to intervene and limited the integration's capabilities in other areas. The new connector also introduces selective sync, allowing decisions on Pardot's access to Salesforce data to be configured on the Pardot side. This is done by setting Marketing Data Sharing Rules in the new integration connector, that are then applied to records being synced to Pardot. As with the equivalent Marketo feature, there are some serious limitations to the selective sync capabilities which mean that many Pardot users will continue to configure Pardot's data access using custom security profiles and Salesforce sharing rules. Most notably, the field used in the sync filter cannot itself be synced with Pardot.

These integration changes are required for the release of Pardot Business Units, which allow prospects and assets to be partitioned between users. Users are assigned to a Business Unit and can only see prospects and assets in their BU. In this respect, they function in a manner similar to Marketo Lead Partitions. Unlike the Marketo equivalent, they are controlled from Salesforce but contain many of the same gotchas. Each Business Unit is effectively an entirely separate Pardot instance, with its own Salesforce integration configuration. Leads, Contacts and Campaigns can only sync with one Pardot Business Unit, whilst users can’t switch between Business Units. Organisations that can live with these limitations and who signed up to Pardot after 11th February should consider testing this new capability. Do bear in mind that the strict data segregation imposed by the feature will result in duplicate records in Salesforce. There is always an overlap between the prospect database of Business Units, even in scenarios where there shouldn't be.

Pardot Custom Domains

Even if they're not using Business Units, there is a useful upgrade to email tracking links for multi-brand organisations. It has long been possible to create multiple landing page domains. However, until now landing page vanity URLs and email tracking links had to use the primary domain. Secondary domains could only be used for landing pages that had the default numeric URL format. This has now been changed. The domain used for email tracking links is now an option in the email template editor, and the domain used for vanity URLs can now be changed when the relevant URL is created. This ensures brand consistency and flexibility across all campaigns.

Pardot Analytics

Users of connected campaigns can now view asset engagement metrics directly from the Salesforce campaign record. There is a new lightning component to support this, but the additional metrics are also synced to Salesforce for Classic users. Note that this capability does require setup, and the data required counts against Salesforce storage limits. However, it does mean that engagement history can now be reported on from Salesforce as well as from Pardot. It can also be added to lead, contact and campaign page layouts so that Sales have the full picture about what their leads and contacts are getting up to.

The integration connector enhancements affect Analytics too, with the configuration of the B2B Marketing Analytics module now being included in the new connector setup screens. This Analytics module is built on top of Einstein Analytics and provides a set of built-in marketing dashboards that respect the new Business Unit capabilities. The downside of this enhancement is that existing competitive integration with GoodData has been retired, this was announced a year ago when B2B Marketing Analytics was made generally available.

Also previously announced was the introduction more accurate click tracking. Many email security tools automatically verify email links prior to delivery by clicking on every link an email. Unless filtered out, these checks count as click-throughs for reporting. This is a major annoyance for Marketing Automation and Email Service Providers, and different tools have different solutions. A new algorithm was introduced in November to filter out automated clicks from the most popular security tools.

Finally, this month marks General Availability of the French, German and Spanish translations of the Pardot User Interface. Pardot users wishing to use Pardot in their native language can change the language from their account setting in Pardot, or Salesforce if they're using a synced account.

As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official release notes. Contents of the release are subject to change.