How To Create A New Campaign In Pardot

If you have been using Pardot for a while you may be aware of Connected Campaigns. This feature enables marketers to connect Pardot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns, and so is a great addition for anyone with a Pardot account syncing with Salesforce. As your prospects interact with your marketing assets, the metrics are pushed through to Salesforce; as a result, sales teams can view the prospect's level of interaction through their lifecycle, and marketers can then track Campaign Influence.

So, how do you set up Pardot Connected Campaigns? This post will take you through my experience setting up this feature, and what I learned along the way.

Step 1: Review Your Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns

The point of connected campaigns is that your campaigns will be identical between Salesforce and Pardot. My key learning from the set up is that before you do anything else, review all of your current Pardot campaigns!

You are going to need Salesforce campaigns for each of the Pardot campaigns you wish to connect, so it's worth checking that you have Salesforce Campaigns to connect with each Pardot campaign (and if you don't, create them because this will make step 3 much easier).

Merge

I found we had a couple of Pardot campaigns which overlapped and I wanted to report on together in Salesforce. You can't connect two Pardot campaigns to one Salesforce campaign so these will need to be merged.

Associate your Marketing Assets

If you switch the feature on, you won't be able to move your files, forms, email templates etc between campaigns. So do this first!

Step 2: Turn On Connected Campaigns

In the Pardot Lightning app:

Click the Pardot Settings tab and select Connectors.
Click to edit the Salesforce connector, and select the Campaigns tab across the top.
Scroll to Connect Campaigns, as shown below:

For now, you will tick some of the boxes here:

Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History,
Show unconnected campaigns in Pardot campaigns tab
Plus, the campaign record types you wish to connect (you may only have a master record type)

If you need an overview of record types generally, read this post that covers Record Types in general. Campaign Record Types in relation to Connected Campaigns are touched on in this video:

Step 3: Campaign Alignment

Now for the interesting bit! You now need to align all of your Pardot Campaigns with Salesforce Campaigns. The first place to start is with those Pardot Campaigns that already have a Salesforce Campaign to align with.

Option 1: Connect Campaigns with Excel

If you go to the Pardot Campaigns tab, you will see an option to "Connect Campaigns with Excel". From here, you can download a workbook with different tabs for Pardot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns. It will automatically highlight any that are already have the same name.

You can then go through this workbook and match up campaigns it hasn't already matched (matches will show on a third tab), then mass update by uploading the workbook.

Option 2: One-by-one Manual Matching

If you have Pardot campaigns that are not connected through using the spreadsheet you can also do this manually.

As you will notice on the image above, if you click on the cog next to a campaign you have the option to "connect to CRM campaign". This will open a box with a drop-down where you can connect to the right Salesforce Campaign. If you did your prep work in step 1 thoroughly you should have your Salesforce campaigns set up, if not you can still create them now. Keep going until all of your campaigns are connected.

Option 3: Salesforce Workbench

You can also use Workbench to connect multiple existing Pardot campaigns to Salesforce at one time.

Select "Bulk Connect Pardot Campaigns to New Salesforce Campaigns". This will export a CSV file with a list of your unconnected Pardot campaigns. Important: if your Salesforce org has required fields on campaigns, you need to add them to this CSV file.

Log in to https://workbench.developerforce.com with your Salesforce account credentials.
Select the following action:

Upload your CSV file and map the fields.

Workbench reports the number of campaigns created and any failures. If a campaign fails to create, the reason is listed in the Status column. The newly connected campaigns appear in the Connected Campaigns view on the Pardot Campaigns page after a short wait.

Step 4: Use Salesforce to Manage Pardot Campaigns

We now need to go back to the campaign set up and allow Salesforce to manage the Pardot campaigns.

So, just as we did in step 2, in the Pardot Lightning app, navigate to:

Click the Pardot Settings tab and select Connectors.
Click to edit the Salesforce connector, and select the Campaigns tab across the top.
Scroll to Connect Campaigns, as shown below:

Then tick the box 'Use Salesforce to Manage all campaigns':

Salesforce is now the central place to manage your campaigns!

Step 5: Change Your Page Layouts in Salesforce to Show Pardot Metrics

An attractive way to show your metrics is by using the Engagement Metrics Component on your campaign page layouts.

So visit one of your newly connected Salesforce campaigns, click on the cog on the top right of the screen, and then click 'edit page'.

Find the Engagement Metrics Component and drag it onto your page. This will then show the widget on all campaigns! Further instructions on how to do this can be found here.

Another option: if you don't want to show the widget you can show each of the metrics as a field on the campaign.

Summary

This post has taken through my experience setting up Pardot Connected Campaigns, and what I learned along the way.

If you want extra tips for Connected Campaigns, read these popular posts (don't get caught in common traps!):