Pardot Business Units: What You Need to Know

Pardot • Business Units

What are Pardot Business Units? Pardot Business Units is a pretty new feature from Pardot and is a big deal for larger organisations who might have marketing teams that operate across different geographical regions (Asia, EMEA etc.), or sell different products/services (e.g Google vs. YouTube), different branding (BMW vs Mini) or for any other organisational reason. With Business Units you can set up email templates in Chinese within the Asia Business Unit and use them for campaigns you run in China, without this asset existing in a Business Unit run solely by US-based team members. Of course, you may want to have a Business Unit per country but as with anything you implement in Pardot, it’s really important to think about how best to structure your account before jumping in! Currently there is a limit of 25 Business Units but there is room for more if you request them. Saying that, if you think you need more than 25 you might want to consider if that really is the best approach. Each Pardot Business Unit will have its own: Tracker Domain

Email Sending Domain

Data / Prospects

Reports

Assets

Currency – As each business unit is essentially its own instance of Pardot, it will be able to use its own currency. Just amend the account settings.

Limits (minus the mailable database, I’ll touch on that lower down) – this means e.g. 50 Engagement Studios for business unit 1, 50 Engagement Studios for business unit 2 etc…

How do Pardot Business Units work? This is the cool part. You can specify criteria in the Marketing Data Sharing settings to easily let Salesforce know what data should be in which business unit. Using the example in the flow chart above, you may have a Region field set up in your account that is either populated with Asia, EMEA or Americas. If a Lead/Contact has the Region EMEA, for example, they will sync to the EMEA business unit. Simple! If, for whatever reason, a prospect is in the wrong business unit e.g. Asia and you later correct the Region information in Salesforce to EMEA, the prospect will be archived in the Asia BU and be synced to the EMEA BU. You set your own criteria for the business unit in the Marketing Data Sharing settings, it doesn’t need to be region-based! Hot tip: the criteria for syncing Business Units should be simple and based on one field. If you’re planning on using multiple criteria, it’s best you use Salesforce automation to match the criteria and roll it up into one field that can be used for the Marketing Data Sharing setting.