What are Pardot Campaigns for? How are they different from Salesforce?
  • Campaigns in Pardot aren't the same as in Salesforce, even though they integrate with them. It's a little confusing.
    • A prospect can only be in 1 campaign, usually the one where they first got onto the list (ex. the campaign selected for an email sign up form). 
    • In Salesforce, Contacts can be in an unlimited number of Campaigns
  • Use-model 1) Pardot Campaigns are typically used as source codes of sorts. The first time a Prospect is added to Pardot, they are assigned a Campaign. 
    • Example: Prospect fills out email sign up form on website that is set to use Email Sign Up Form Campaign in Pardot. The newly created Prospect record has them assigned to Email Sign Up Form Campaign. 
  • Use-model 2) The Pardot<>Salesforce connector uses campaigns as the method for identifying which Salesforce Contacts should be synced over to Pardot as Prospects.
    • In theory, they designed it like this because Pardot Campaigns are where Prospects enter the system. That's not really how anyone thinks about them, but the developers saw it that way.
    • There are multiple ways to map a Salesforce Campaign to a Pardot Campaign. The general method we use is via any Salesforce Campaign with a record type that matches what we set up in the Pardot Connected Campaigns settings.
What about Lists?
  • Fundamentally, Pardot Campaigns are not used for segmentation. Pardot uses Lists for segmentation.
  • Lists are more like Salesforce Campaigns in practice
  • I generally create an All Contacts Pardot Campaign and use that most of the time. Then I add Prospects to relevant lists to know if they came from a particular form or something similar. Pardot also tracks that automatically, so you can always create a list of Prospects that submitted a particular form with a Segmentation Rule.
How do I create new Pardot Campaigns?
  • You don't. You create a new Salesforce Campaign that has a selected record type. Then that Campaign syncs to Pardot as a Connected Campaign. You can then select it. There can be a delay in the sync of a few minutes.