How to Set Up Conversion Tracking on Pardot (Salesforce MCAE)

Posted: Jan 30, 2022

Updated: June 25, 2022

Note: In April 2022, Pardot was renamed to "Marketing Cloud Account Engagement." However, Pardot is not a "part of" Marketing Cloud in the sense that Pardot and Marketing Cloud function separately and are not part of the same Salesforce product architecture. The main difference is that Pardot is geared towards b2b marketing, while Marketing Cloud is better suited for b2c marketing. See this post by Salesforce Ben for a in-depth explanation of the different features.

Set up the Salesforce-Pardot Connector

First, sync Pardot and Salesforce so both your marketing and sales teams have visibility into the most recent conversion records. Only one CRM connector can be active simultaneously in Pardot, and for most clients that's Salesforce. The Pardot Integration User is an automatically provisioned user that connects to Salesforce to sync data. Pardot is the only app that can log in to Salesforce via the integration user, and only after a Salesforce admin has finished the Pardot setup.

Pardot checks for changes in Salesforce in almost real time - every two minutes to be exact. There are default activities that trigger a sync from Pardot to Salesforce, but you can override them manually or disable syncs if you'd prefer to keep some data only in Pardot. By default, Pardot creates new contacts in Salesforce as Leads, but Support can change this setting for you and enable the reverse sync feature.

Many of my clients use the Salesforce-Pardot connector (Salesforce connector), with the marketing team using Pardot to manage their pipeline, and once the leads are warm enough, moving them to Salesforce for the sales team. Connect Pardot to a Salesforce sandbox or production environment, using email as the unique identifier unless "allow multiple prospects with same email address" is enabled.

Custom objects are useful for syncing Salesforce contacts or leads to Pardot, so you can use that data in segmentation and automations. Users can create and sync a custom object from anything that is linked to a contact, lead, or account in Salesforce, to Pardot. Most fields including formula fields, dependent fields, and picklists can be synced bidirectionally in Pardot and Salesforce, but there are some exceptions such as lookups.

Sandboxes create copies of your Salesforce org in separate environments. Use them for development, testing, and training, without compromising the data and applications in your production org.

Forms and Form Handlers

Pardot forms are built and managed directly on Pardot. For example, you can build a Pardot form on a Pardot landing page.

Form handlers integrate with third-party platforms such as Wix or WordPress, and funnel the form submission data into Pardot. This is the recommended method if you need to maintain the current lead flow from an existing lead generation strategy. Regardless of whether you use Pardot forms or form handlers, the other features are still available. For example, you can create a completion action on the form to notify sales reps via email or send an autoresponder email using email template.

Completion actions allow you automatically trigger actions (assign to queue, set profile, increment prospect field value, etc.) after another action is completed - for example, when a prospect completes a form, visits a page or downloads a file. Completion actions are available within forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails and page actions.

Completion action notes:

• Completion actions are not retroactive.

• Completion actions cannot be applied directly on a landing page.

• Most completion actions execute every time they are triggered. However, completion actions based on email link clicks only execute once per prospect.

• "Adjust score” completion action executes once per prospect per unique custom redirect in a 24 hour period.

• Completion actions only execute for prospects, not visitors.

• Completion actions don’t execute on image file downloads or on filtered activities.

• To trigger conditional completion actions based on responses on a Pardot form - create identical form handlers for each response, and change the completion actions accordingly.

UTM Parameters in Form Submissions

There are several ways to pass UTM parameters from your PPC campaigns and landing pages, and capture them in Pardot form submissions. All of them are basically doing the same thing - add custom code to your webpage that will get the UTM parameters and submit them as hidden fields in the form.

Probably the most common method is adding the scripts directly in the body html of your webpages. You'll need to implement two scripts to get the UTM parameters from your PPC campaigns and pass them through Pardot form submissions. The first script should be added to every page, to grab the query parameter and push it into sessionStorage. The sessionStorage object stores key/value pairs in the browser, such as the following example.

sessionStorage.setItem("lastname", "Smith");
sessionStorage.getItem("lastname");

The second script should be placed only on the or page, to grab the sessionStorage value and insert a hidden field with it into the form.

Note on combining this method with auto-tagging in Google Ads. This method still works even if you are using auto-tagging to sync Google Ads and Analytics. Just make sure that UTM override is not turned on in Analytics. That way, Google Analytics will continue to prioritize auto-tagging by default, while Pardot and Salesforce will have the UTM parameters.

Other Solutions to Pass UTM Parameters to Pardot:

• Third party tools such as Zapier

• I also came across this github repository: Save URL Parameters

• If your form is not in iFrame, you can also use GTM. See this comprehensive post from analytics mania. However, GTM can be blocked by some ad blockers or other third-party extensions, so using the custom JavaScript variable is not widely recommended.

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PPC Conversion Tracking

Find the Pardot tracking code from campaigns > your campaign name > view tracking code in Pardot, and implement it on your pages. The Pardot tracking code is pretty much like any other tracking codes for analytics or paid ads - just copy and paste it into your web page html before the </body> tag. Back in Pardot, the tracking code is also useful for seeing prospect's click path through your website's content, and triggering page actions to occur when a prospect visits a certain URL.

To track where a prospect originates when they visit your website, create a custom redirect for each ad, and select a Pardot campaign for each custom redirect.

Custom redirects allow you to track when your prospects click on those pages. This can be integrated with Google Analytics parameters as well during setup. The custom redirect statistics table, located in the custom redirects tab and within the content report, is where you can find the results such as how many unique clicks the redirect has generated.

Generally, prospects are assigned to the Pardot campaign associated with their first touchpoint, and that does not change going forward. However, you can set the completion action for the custom redirect to change the campaign.