What You Need to Know About Pardot Custom Objects

May 22, 2021
Greenkey Digital, Pardot Custom Objects

Setting up Pardot custom objects is like getting a new addition to your house. It’s new. It’s exciting, and it opens up a new realm of possibilities.

While Pardot syncs with Salesforce Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities, you may want more. Syncing Pardot custom objects to Salesforce gives you better integration and customization for your marketing assets.

By default, Pardot Advanced edition can map up to four custom objects. For Pardot accounts with Plus edition, the feature is available at an additional cost. Check with your Salesforce Account Executive for more information.

What is a Pardot custom object?

As I mentioned, Pardot natively connects with these standard objects: Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity.

But what if you use Cases (Salesforce standard object), or Media Spend (Salesforce custom object)?

Pardot custom objects will allow you to connect with any Salesforce objects that are not native to Pardot – as long as there is a relationship between the lead, contact or account objects.

Pardot Custom Objects Syncs with Other Salesforce Standard Objects

Standard objects are objects included in Salesforce.

Quote
Case
Order
Asset

Pardot Custom Objects Syncs with Salesforce Custom Objects

Custom objects are objects that you create to store information that’s specific to your company or industry.

Media Spend
Properties
Rentals
Donations

How do Pardot Custom Objects work?

Here’s the catch with custom objects-they must be tied to a Pardot prospect record through a prospect ID. You can sync any Salesforce custom object with Pardot that is linked to a contact, lead, or account in your CRM (you need at least one lookup field). Open the Salesforce object schema to guide you in the context of your Salesforce instance.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the Pardot Custom Object is read-only. You won’t be able to use Pardot automation or Prospect activity to update custom object records.

How to set up Pardot Custom Objects

Navigate to Admin | Custom Objects, and click + Add Custom Object.

Select a CRM object.

If necessary, edit the display name, plural display name, and display field.

When finished, click Save custom object.

Now go back and edit the custom object. Choose which fields you would like to ‘Display in table’. These will appear on the Custom Object tab on the Pardot Prospect record.

What can go wrong?

If you are missing fields from your custom object, go to the object manager and set the field-level security to “visible” for the Salesforce connector. (see image below)
Still missing fields? You may need to resync the metadata manually. Go to Pardot Settings > Salesforce connector to resync the metadata.
Also, manually sync custom object records that were created in Salesforce before the Pardot connector was created.

Points to Ponder

You cannot use variable tags with custom objects. Sorry.

Consider creating a formula field or building a Process Builder to populate the custom object field on the Lead, Contact, Account or Opportunity objects.
Custom objects sync every 10 minutes.
Custom user roles don’t grant access to custom objects by default. Manually grant custom object permissions for each custom role.

Pardot automation with custom objects

Hooray! You can use custom objects in automation rules. A custom object automation rule matches prospects related to a custom object. Pardot custom object fields can be used as criteria when creating dynamic lists, automation rules, and segmentation rules.

Go to Marketing > Automation > Automation Rules, and click + Add Automation Rule.
From the dropdown, select “Prospect custom object”.
Here are your choices in the dropdown:

“Related” matches any prospects that are related to any instances of the selected custom object via the selected relation field.
“Not related” matches any prospects that aren’t related to any instances of the selected custom object via the selected relation field.
“Related with properties” matches any related prospects with any properties you define.