Pardot Connected Campaigns

Pardot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns are different things. Wait, what?

Yes, confusing. But not any more! Pardot Connected Campaigns correct something that should always have been, as it aligns Pardot campaigns to Salesforce campaigns and means there’s complete alignment for your reporting across both systems.

The gist of this, is that Salesforce becomes the new place for you to create all of your marketing and sales campaigns. It means Campaigns, as an object, becomes read-only in Pardot but you’ll still be able to choose what folder it’s saved in, tag it as you need to and assign prospects.

Benefits of Pardot Connected Campaigns:

Campaign alignment: 1-1 relationship between Pardot & Salesforce campaigns



Enables campaign influence reporting & attribute revenue to different marketing campaigns with custom models



View engagement history metrics in Salesforce records



Seamless reporting between Pardot & Salesforce and is a step toward the single-cloud approach



No duplicated efforts when creating campaigns



Capability to track all touches across the customer journey



Rich reporting in B2B Marketing Analytics



Considerations before turning Pardot Connected Campaigns on

There’s some prep to do before turning Pardot Connected Campaigns on. Don’t just flick it on and hope for the best please, that’s absolutely not best-practice and I hate to bring bad news but it’s never gone well for anybody.

I like to refer to this whole process as ‘zipping Pardot and Salesforce up’ because it really brings the two systems closer together in a poetic way. Beforehand, they used to be a strong married couple but after turning connected campaigns on, they’re like a married couple who just renewed their vows and then went on honeymoon to an island for 2 weeks. They are talking the same language and actually understanding each other, which brings lots of new benefits.

What you need to consider:

Ensure Salesforce Campaigns are assigned to a record type in Salesforce . This record type will need to be selected for enablement during setup.



Be sure to set up Salesforce campaigns that mirror Pardot campaigns so you can then connect them. For example, Website Tracking and Google Ads might not be set up in Salesforce, but they will be in Pardot. It’s a 1-1 relationship so it needs to exist both sides when you turn this feature on.



Add engagement history fields on the Salesforce Page Layouts for connected campaign record types to allow engagement data to show.



At the point of enablement, you will only be able to use Pardot campaigns that have been connected to a Salesforce campaign.



Pardot campaigns become read-only and cannot be created in Pardot. Use Salesforce moving forward.



Steps for campaign alignment: