It can be extremely beneficial to integrate your Pardot and Google Analytics data for a number of reasons. In this blog, we will tell you what those reasons are and also how you can set up your integration.
Here’s what you will be looking at:
How is Google Analytics Reporting Different than Pardot?
Google Analytics may be considered as the gold standard for reporting when it comes to website traffic and engagement. It helps you understand and track things like:
- traffic volume
- time spent on site
- number of novel visitors
- the average number of pages per visit
- bounce rate
- user demographics
Pardot also tracks these metrics but both tools do so in different ways. Google Analytics primarily captures the data that provides answers to questions like what happened and how much. Basically, it tracks aggregate level activity information on everything that is happening with your site. Pardot takes it a step further by providing an answer to the question of who did it.
Pardot is aimed at finding out which particular prospects are taking action and which actions they are taking. This intel can be very helpful to marketers in achieving the right communications, by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Once Pardot is involved, you can transmit the required data to sales or even use it to kick off automated programs.
The Need for Integrating Pardot and Google Analytics Data
By connecting Pardot and Google Analytics, you will be able to capture some additional data about how people discover you and end up on your website. This is definitely helpful if you are running an AdWords campaign or any other digital marketing initiative to bring new people to your site.
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Setting Up the Pardot Google Analytics Connector
Setting up the connector is very easy. Bonus, it is available in all the Pardot editions.
- In Pardot, go to Admin | Connectors.
- Click on + Add Connector.
- Then, click on Google Analytics.
- Finally, click on Create Connector.
You will be prompted with the option to automatically create Pardot campaigns and connect prospects to Pardot campaigns from Google Analytics campaigns.
Then ensures that your Google Analytics tracking code will be included in all of your Pardot assets (like forms and landing pages).
What Google Analytics Data Appears in Pardot
Once you have the connector set up, you will be able to see a new section on Prospect records in Salesforce:
The Google Analytics connector will pull UTM parameters into the new fields ( which can then be loaded over to Salesforce).
UTM Parameters
UTM is an abbreviation for Urchin Tracking Module. It is appended to the end of a URL and helps you track the source of traffic and understand where people are coming from.
Following are the 5 UTM parameters that Pardot collects from Google Analytics data:
- Medium: How your message is sent to the user, for example, email, cpc, social.
- Source – Where the viewer came from, for example, examples: bing, google, yahoo.
- Campaign – The name of your marketing initiative, for example, test-2020.
- Content – This parameter may be used to distinguish between different content variations in a campaign, for example, test-india, test-usa.
- Term – This tells you about the keyword used in paid search campaigns.
Setting Up UTM Parameters
You will have the facility to enable auto-tagging for AdWords, and Google Analytics provides an easy to use URL builder for manual tagging as well. This can be used to generate specific URLs which let you capture the 5 data points mentioned.
For example, if you wanted to run an ad on the site of a trade publication, you could use the URL builder to create a campaign link:
Limitations of the Pardot Google Analytics Connector
Customers may often assume that their connector is not working because the Google Analytics fields are not populated on all prospects. However, this does not mean that it is non-functional. It is important to remember that it is only grabbing the values for the first prospect interaction. Prospects that already exist will not have these values retroactively populated.
A few nuances may be involved if you are trying to use the optional setting which allows the connector to automatically create Pardot campaigns for the values being grabbed by the utm_campaign field.
If you switch this optional setting on, the GA campaign will override the Pardot campaign that would have otherwise been captured for a prospect. The utm_source field also trumps the default Pardot source. In certain cases, this can be the required behaviour.
IMPORTANT: Please do not turn on this optional setting if you are employing connected campaigns. It may result in a lot of extra campaigns being created that do not behave the same as the rest of your campaigns.
Conclusion
In this blog post, you have learnt about Pardot and Google Analytics, the importance of connecting the two and how this connection can be set up. However, this process requires manual intervention and can be difficult to perform for a non-technical user. This is where Hevo comes to the rescue!
Also, you might have valuable data in various other marketing applications that need to be brought together for a complete understanding of your customers. To do that, you need to write custom code, which can get very complicated. You can avoid all of this by trying out Hevo Data. It supports 100+ Sources including 30+ Free sources like Google Analytics, Pardot, etc.
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With an analytical perspective and a problem-solving approach, Shruti has extensive experience in solving business problems of data teams by delivering thoroughly researched content pivotal for data practitioners.