Connect Google Analytics and Pardot Data: A Comprehensive Guide

Google Analytics is a powerful and widely used analytics tool by companies across the world and Pardot is Salesforce’ B2B Marketing automation platform. Both applications supplement each other quite well and hence in this guide, we explore the topic of Google Analytics and Pardot Data integration and the required steps to achieve so.

Introduction

Pardot is a marketing automation tool meant for business marketing. Marketing automation tools perform best when they are paired with customer relationship management software. Being an offering from Salesforce, Pardot integrates tightly with the famous CRM.

Pardot helps users automate their marketing process by creating rules based on events. For example, Pardot lets you define action rules for specific events. A typical event is when someone fills the contact us form on your website or when someone interacts with the marketing emails that you send out. Pardot provides options to report based on this engagement data and helps marketers groom their leads into opportunities through constant interaction. This post is about integrating Google Analytics and Pardot data.

• Why Integrate Google Analytics and Pardot Data
• Prerequisites
• Steps to Connect Google Analytics and Pardot Data
• Conclusion

Why Integrate Google Analytics and Pardot Data

An obvious question to the uninitiated is about the benefits of integrating Google Analytics with Pardot when the tool itself provides reporting abilities on the marketing asset interaction. To understand the benefit, we first need to understand the difference between the data elements captured by Google Analytics and Pardot data.

Pardot captures metrics about how your customers interact with your marketing assets. For example, it collects data about how many users fill your marketing form or how many of them dropped out without filling it. Google Analytics, on the other hand, captures data about the sources of your leads. For example, it tells you where your lead originated from or about your lead’s intention when he clicked on the link that redirected to your marketing asset. Having access to data from both these tools allow marketers to get a complete picture of their leads. 

Now that we understand why it is important to connect Google Analytics and Pardot data, let us delve into how we can accomplish this.

Prerequisites

• Pardot account with admin privileges.
• Google analytics data with admin privileges.
• Basic understanding of marketing automation tools and web analytics.

Steps to Connect Google Analytics and Pardot Data

Before we go into details, it must be made clear the intention of this exercise is to bring specific data elements captured by Google Analytics into your pardon data and not vice-versa. The reporting and the analysis will happen inside Pardot.

• Step 1: The first step of the integration is to head to the Pardot Lightning App and click on Pardot Settings.
• Step 2: From the Pardot Settings, head to the connectors tab and click Add Connectors. 

• Step 3: Click Google Analytics and Click Add Connector.
• Step 4: You will be asked to verify your Google Analytics admin account by entering the credentials.
• Step 5: Before finishing up, you will receive a prompt to save the connector as below.

Ensure that the checkbox to automatically create Pardot campaigns is disabled if your connected campaign feature is enabled. If it is enabled, Pardot will automatically create campaigns every time a google analytics campaign is created, resulting in a messy list of campaigns. 

• Step 6: The next step is to add the tracking code from your Google Analytics Campaign. If you are unfamiliar with setting up a Google Analytics campaign, head to this blog for detailed instructions. Once a campaign is created, copy the javascript code and paste it into the layout of your Pardot marketing assets. For this, head to the content section of your Pardot Lightning App and click Layout templates.

• Step 7: Click your favourite template or feel free to create one. In the layout tab, add the copied script inside the head section and save the template. Ensure that this is done to all the Pardot marketing assets you use.

• Step 8: Once the above steps are done, you will notice that the Google Analytics parameters appear in Salesforce Pardot Prospect records. The additional fields that appear are Source, Medium, Term, Content, and Campaign. Source and Term are extremely important since they provide information on the origin of your lead and the search term used respectively. Other details can be set for specific links via the Google Analytics control panel.

That completes the step involved in integrating Google Analytics with Pardot Data. 

Conclusion

This method enables you to track Google Analytics parameters from your Pardot reports. You can view the Google Analytics data in your analytics dashboard as well. If you want Google to track your conversion as well, you will need to build a “Thank you” or “Complete” page and redirect to it from your marketing form. 

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If you use a lot of analytics tools together to get your work done, it may be worthwhile to consider a cloud-based ETL tool like Hevo to easily integrate them together. Hevo supports most cloud-based and on-premise data sources like Google Analytics, Pardot for free and helps you seamlessly bring data from one source to another with a few clicks. 

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