Become a Pardot Whiz With These Helpful Tips

September 11, 2021
Custom Redirects, Greenkey Digital, Tags

These tips are from my friend Claudia Hoops, a Pardot consultant at Destined. She posted these insights on LinkedIn, and I grabbed a handful that had the most engagement.

#1 – Page Action Counter

Page Actions are a nifty, but powerful Pardot feature and, in my experience, often underutilized. They allow you to overlay specific pages on your website with Pardot Marketing Automation actions.

You can find them under Automation > Page Actions

They help you notify a user, update a prospect field value based on page visits, add scoring points to a specific category, or adding them to a list which is attached to a nurture to name a few.

Now, did you ever want to understand how many pages a prospect visits on your website to score/prioritize them based on that?

You can do that by creating a number field in Pardot – I called it Page Visit Counter. You then want to create a Page Action which would fire every time any of your website pages is visited, which looks like this www.website.com/* and set a completion action to increment the Page Visit Counter field by 1 – see attached picture.

#2 – Dynamic URLS

Have you ever found yourself in the following scenario?

You might have a list of different PDF documents which you’d like to offer for download via a dropdown in a form and upon form submission, the right PDF is ‘magically’ sent to the prospect via email/downloads?

This is achievable by using merge fields dynamically in your URLs. Let’s say we have a Sales Cloud and a Pardot brochure available in the dropdown. Upon selecting Pardot from the dropdown, the value ‘Pardot’ gets pushed into our Product Interest custom field.

Assuming our product brochures are hosted on our website with a url called www.website.com/pardot the form redirect location could look like the attached screenshot which dynamically places Pardot in this scenario into the url upon submitting.

Alternatively, you can build custom redirects and overlay these with your brochures with vanity urls like info.website.com/pardot and create the same dynamic url redirect.

Thanks for this idea Anupriya Loganathan.

#3 – Add to list option

Do you have a field such as product interest and ideally a prospect should become a member of the list upon choosing their interest? Did you know that that’s actually possible without setting up automation rules?

In the attached screenshot you can see there’s an add to list option when setting up prospect fields in the backend as well as using those fields within forms to automatically add a prospect to a static list. Go to Pardot Setting > Prospect Fields > Edit Custom Field.

#4 – Favorite Tag Use Cases

Pardot’s Tags are great for all sorts of segmentation in your Pardot database – prospects, assets – emails, forms, landing pages, lists to name a few. They can also be used to slice and dice your reports and dashboards in B2B Analytics.

You can find them under Content > Tags

Be mindful of creating/adding tags and spelling errors as Pardot does automatically create a new tag for each one you are creating, i.e. “product name a” vs “productnamea”.

Here are a few of my favorite #tag uses cases:

Quickly filter your prospect database based on different criteria such as assigned user, internal staff, competitors, partner, b2b or b2c without the need to create a list for each
Tag all email templates used in an Engagement Program to easily filter & compare only their performance in Pardot Email Template or B2B Analytics reporting.
Add a tag to prospects at the start of an Engagement Program and remove it again at the end so you can see which prospects are currently in which program.

#5 – Custom Redirects

Pardot’s Custom Redirects enable you to track link clicks on all sorts of links – whether owned by you or not. Also known as Marketing Links, you can overlay them with Completion Actions to fire on prospects known in your database which makes them very powerful.

You can find them under Content > Custom Redirects

Here are a few of my favorite #customredirect uses cases:

Overlay your marketing content for download on your website and in emails with custom redirects to understand best performing content and segmenting your database at the same time
Inviting prospects to a webinar/event via email but only need to know if they can make it or not? Place a button in your email each with Yes/No and add completion actions to add them to the respective campaign with status registered. No need to complete additional forms.
Creating an NPS survey? Use a custom redirect for each option and add an NPS score update field to the completion actions.

This Pardot article written by: Jen Kazin