Don’t use Custom Redirects in Pardot for Google Ads tracking

Using Custom Redirects in Account Engagement (Pardot) for tracking Google Ads clicks produces unreliable data. What you see in MCAE will never match what you see in Google Ads.

You should let Google Ads do what it does and track the ad’s clicks.

Marketers add Pardot to the mix because they want to do attribution and deeper reporting. But if you can’t rely on the click data in Pardot, where does that leave you on the reporting question?

Pardot’s AdWords connector is good but also deeply flawed. The data it provides is misleading. If you don’t know that ahead of time, you will end up reporting on metrics that are only 1/2 true or worse.

However! The Google Ads connector is good for one thing: Conversion tracking in Pardot.

Once you add a conversion pixel from an Google Ads campaign to the Pardot form thank-you page section, you enable Pardot to tie the Pardot Tracking Code/Cookie to the Google Ads conversion Tracking Code/Cookie.

The data you are seeing in the Paid Search Report in Pardot under “Conversions” will now show reliable data. Those are Conversions that happened from that Google Ads campaign.

Going a step further, the conversions can be added to a campaign, and to an opportunity.

Now you have something to share with your leadership that better represents reality. By using the impression, click, and CTR data from Google Ads with the conversion data from Pardot and the campaign/opportunity association in Salesforce, you can present a complete funnel.

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