Pardot Reports: Easy Guide

Introduction

Pardot is a marketing automation tool from Salesforce that is focused on business to business marketing. It helps users automate lead capturing, first engagement, and related activities till the lead grows to become an opportunity. It does this by allowing marketers to define rules of interactions when a potential lead interacts with marketing collateral like a contact form, webinar, or even a landing page.

Pardot provides a simple user interface compared to competitors like Marketo. Its simple interface provides a much shorter learning curve. The biggest advantage of Pardot comes from its tight integration with Salesforce CRM which has the reputation of being one of the best among cloud CRMs. Pardot allows users to report on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by inviting attention to engagement history and related metrics. This post is about how to build Pardot reports to understand your engagement metrics.

• Understanding Salesforce and Pardot Reports
• Prerequisites
• Building Pardot Reports for Landing Page 
• Conclusion

Understanding Salesforce and Pardot Reports

Pardot provides a set of built-in reports that can be accessed directly from the Pardot dashboard. These reports cover all the basics needed but lack the customizability of Salesforce reports. Most users will not be using Pardot independently and will be using it together with Salesforce CRM. If you are using Pardot independently without Salesforce, you will have to be content with the reports available in the Pardot dashboard. In case you want more from the reports and want to customize them, read further into this blog. 

Pardot can be integrated with salesforce using the connected campaign feature. This helps you to connect all your Pardot campaigns with Salesforce at once or individually based on your use case. What it does is open up Salesforce’s excellent report building capabilities to Pardot data. You will now learn how to enable the connected campaign feature and build Pardot reports. We will base this tutorial on building a report for a marketing landing page automation that is part of the campaign. Being the simplest automation possible, this is usually the first marketing automation task that organizations attempt. 

Prerequisites

• A Salesforce account with permissions for General Account administration, Pardot marketing user role, and B2B Marketing Automation App Permission.
• The basic idea of marketing automation and customer relationship management

Building Pardot Reports for Landing Page 

1. The first step in building a report for the Pardot report to Salesforce is to enable the connected campaign feature. For this, go to the lightning app and head to the Pardot settings tab. Select connectors and then click the settings icon. Select the campaigns tab and select ‘Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History’

Ensure that marketing campaigns are selected in the campaign report types. 

2. The next step is to head to your salesforce lightning app and create a custom report type. In the salesforce campaign tab, create a new campaign.

Add the relevant details and click save.

3. Now go to your Pardot marketing form and choose the campaign you created for the form.

4. After saving the configuration in the Pardot lightning app, go to Salesforce and create a custom report type. If you haven’t created custom report types before, please check our detailed blog on salesforce custom report types here.
5. In the custom report type section, select the primary object type as campaigns and fill in the label and report type name for future reference. 

6. In the secondary object tab, select the Landing page as the secondary object. Ensure that you select ‘Each A record must have at least one B record’’
7. The next step is the drag the required fields to the reports and save the report. For this case, we can select fields like total form submissions, unique form submissions, form submission rate, etc. Click save and your report will be saved in the category you specified in the fifth step. You can head to the report section to view your newly created report.

That’s it !, You have successfully built a salesforce report using Pardot data. 

Conclusion

The advantage of using this approach over the built-in Pardot reports is the customizability and flexibility it offers. Since in any case, it is not practical to use a marketing automation tool without using a CRM, it is recommended to use Salesforce reports with Pardot campaigns. This will help to maintain your campaigns in a cleaner way rather than maintaining first touch attributions in Pardot and then Salesforce again having data about all touchpoints.

Whether you choose to use Pardot independently or with a CRM, you will have multiple hurdles to cross to integrate data from your marketing automation tool with your CRM or business intelligence tools. In such cases, a cloud-based ETL tool like Hevo that can integrate with most on-premise and cloud-based data sources can be a great help. 

Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline. It supports pre-built integrations from 100+ data sources, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. at a reasonable price. Hevo provides a fully automated solution for data migration.

Let Hevo take your task of data migration and sign up for a 14-day free trial today.

You can now replicate your Pardot data to any Data Warehouse such as Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, or a destination of your choice without writing code in just a few minutes for free with Hevo.