Pardot Sandboxes: What They Can, and Can’t Do

March 30, 2023
Pardot Sandboxes, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

In the early days of my consultancy career, I started working on multiple projects that required a fully mirrored production environment, known as a sandbox. However, Pardot Sandboxes are a relatively new feature, and so, the documentation is somewhat lacking. There are definitely some limitations that you need to be aware of before using a Pardot Sandbox.

What I needed at that point was the answer to a straightforward question: what can I build in Sandbox? In this article, I will give you the answer…

Pardot Sandboxes

Online, all I could find was a list of pros and cons for what you should or shouldn’t test in Sandbox. So I started making a list:

What You Can Do in a Pardot Sandbox

Build a copy of our Pardot instance including:
- Assets
- Automation Rules and Engagement Studio nurtures.
- Forms
- Fields and their mapping to Salesforce Sandbox fields (including what field sync behavior works best for our needs)
- Content
- Scoring and Grading Rules
- Folder structure
Test solutions in a safe environment
Testing Lead/Contact <> Prospect sync behavior
Test how the data flows between the two platforms
Test user sync.

What You Can’t Do in a Pardot Sandbox

Send emails
Test emails
Understand the deliverability of emails
Promote solutions to production
Test B2B Marketing Analytics
Test Salesforce Engage

The Setup

Setting up a Sandbox is easy if you follow the most up-to-date Pardot (Account Engagement) Setup Implementation Guide.

Note: Because emails can’t be sent from a Sandbox, setting up email authentication is irrelevant.

My Experience

If you’re reading this article, you may know that nothing can be promoted from Pardot Sandbox to production, and instead it has to be replicated. For this reason, I was very reluctant to build in a Sandbox environment.

However, as I started working on various elements, I realized that creating an entire solution without fear of making mistakes would become transformative to my career.

Here are some additional Pardot Sandbox ‘gotchas’ I learnt from my experience:

Advanced or Premium Salesforce Edition customers can have Pardot Sandboxes. One Salesforce Sandbox for each Pardot Sandbox.
A Salesforce Sandbox refresh deletes your Pardot Sandbox. Make sure your Salesforce team is well aware of this as it cannot be reversed.
Pardot Sandboxes can’t connect directly to a Salesforce Production environment.
Pardot assets and fields can’t be shared between Sandboxes and Production accounts; all must be recreated manually in production (however, this is likely to become available in the future).
Don’t make promises about email deliverability until your domains are set up in production.
Before installing the Pardot Sandbox package, B2BMA must be uninstalled and deleted.
Sandboxes are slow! Hang in there and understand that you have to wait for your outcomes.

Summary

Although the concept behind Pardot Sandboxes is far from perfect, they allow users to experiment and learn. The connection to the Salesforce Sandbox environment means that users can test Pardot solutions which rely on Salesforce setup, flows, and other automation.

I love learning on the job and there are very few things you can’t do in a Sandbox that you can do in production. Pardot Sandboxes have allowed me to actively work on improving solutions before they go live, while also enabling me to continue experimenting with new ideas using the foundations of an existing solution.

This Pardot article written by: