Connectors on Matt Lincoln - Salesforce, Pardot and Martech.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) and Google Ads Integration

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

What do Pardot and Google Ads have in common? They both had a somewhat questionable name change from a recognisable brand to a very generic and difficult-to-research product name. So whether you found this article using the good old names, or the newer names, what we’ll try and unpack here, is the typical steps for getting Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Google Ads to “talk” to each other.

As a marketer, you’re measured on delivering a great Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). So you’re going to want to make sure that the Google Ads you run, generate a net positive outcome for your organization. That’s where the Pardot Google Ads (formerly known as Adwords) connector comes in.

What does the connector do?

It’s important to start by explaining what the connector does and doesn’t do. A common misconception, is that the connector allows you to manage your Ads in Pardot. In fact, it doesn’t have that capability – Google Ads is a highly complex and customizable tool, which wouldn’t be practical to replicate all the functionality around how to set up, target and bid for Ads in Pardot. So you’ll still need to create and edit your ads directly in Google’s interface. However what the connector does do, is give you insights directly in Pardot about the performance of your ads and which Prospects they’ve influenced.

The way I like to describe the connector, is that Google Ads out of the box gives you plenty of insight into the aggregated performance of your ads, such as the ranking of your Ads, the number of clicks, and the number of “conversions” on your website, whatever you define a conversion to be (if you have the Google Ad tracking pixel installed on your website). However in a B2B Marketing context, the most useful thing for us to know, is how our Keywords, Ad Groups and Campaigns, influence our Opportunities in Salesforce, how many end up as Closed Won, and how much revenue we generate from those Opportunities. In this sense I see the Pardot Google Ads Connector, as our way to “stitch together” what we’ve set up in Google Ads, with what’s actually happening in Salesforce CRM.

How do I set up the connector?

You’ll first need to ensure you have the login details for an Admin user of your Google Ads account, and also your Ads account number.

1. In the Pardot Lightning app, select Pardot Settings and then Connectors.

2. Click the Add Connector button.

3. Select Google Ads.

4. Click Create Connector.

5. A popup will appear. Enter your Google Ads admin credentials and allow the Pardot permissions. Then enter your Google Ads account number.

6. Save the connector.

7. Back In Pardot, select “Verify Now” next to the Google Ads connector.

8. Wait around 20 minutes for Pardot to import the details of your ads, campaign groups and campaigns

What about attribution?

Just setting up the connector isn’t enough to have full tracking capabilities. You need to add something called a “Final URL Suffix” to your Google Ads. This essentially tells Google Ads to add to the URL of any Ad click, some additional information which can be understood by Pardot.

It’s worth understanding that there are different “levels” in your Google Ads account where you can apply this tracking suffix. You can apply it for your whole account, or for only specific campaigns, ad groups, keywords or individual ads. Consider whether your Ads account is shared with other teams/functions which might need their own tracking.

To get your Final URL Suffix:

1. Open the Pardot Lightning app.

2. Navigate to Pardot Settings à Connectors.

3. Click on the settings gear at the side of the Google Ads connector, then Tracking.

4. Copy your Final URL Suffix snippet.

5. Give the Final URL Suffix to your Google Ads admin, who will add the Final URL Suffix field of your ad’s URL.

The other aspect around attribution is which Pardot Campaign newly created Prospects from Google Ads are associated to. Pardot by default associates Prospects who first visit your site via a Google Ad, with the Pardot Campaign “Google Ads”. As you can imagine, this isn’t very specific. How about if you run wildly different Ads in your account, which you want to track separately in terms of performance and budgets? The good news is that we can customize this behaviour and have flexibility over which Campaigns your Prospects are associated to!

After the roughly 20 minutes period has elapsed after setting up your connector, return to Pardot and:

1. Navigate in the Lightning app to Content à Search à Paid Search

2. Find and select the Google Ads campaign that you want to specify a custom Pardot Campaign for

3. Select “Edit paid search campaign”

4. Choose your new campaign from the dropdown.

5. Click “Save campaign”

What is auto-tagging?

A common “gotcha” with Google Ads in Pardot is that clients notice that once they run Google Ads, they aren’t able to capture UTM Parameters from these clicks such as utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term and utm_content in their Pardot forms.

This is because Google Ads condenses these UTM Parameters into a single, proprietary URL parameter called a gclid. Because Pardot is unable to parse gclid into its component fields, if you still require to capture UTM Parameters or any other custom URL parameters from a Google Ad click, you can ask your Google Ads admin to disable a feature called “auto-tagging”

New Salesforce Validation Rules + Old data = Pardot Sync Errors

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So, your Salesforce Admin just introduced a new Validation Rule, and subsequently, you noticed that your Sync Error queue in Pardot has been backlogged with an alarmingly high number of Prospects.

When we think about sync errors, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of assuming that Pardot is sending across invalid data into Salesforce.

In fact, that’s not the most common scenario.

The way it normally plays out is that a SF Admin introduces a new Validation Rule, tests it successfully, then moves on to their next task. The hidden iceberg under the water, is that there’s now an existing set of records in your Salesforce org that no longer meet the criteria for this Validation Rule.

This is great until Pardot wants to update the record. As we know, there are plenty of triggers which cause Pardot to re-sync to Salesforce and this can be as simple as updating the Prospect’s score based on them viewing a Landing Page or opening an Email.

Imagine that our SF Admin has introduced a Validation Rule to require the City to be populated when a Lead’s Country is United Kingdom. The challenge here is that when Pardot attempts to update any field, whether that’s Score, Pardot URL, or anything else not relevant to that Validation Rule, it’s still triggered by Pardot’s update, preventing Pardot from making updates to the record and bumping the Prospect into the Sync Error queue until re-sync is manually re-initiated.

There are quite a few approaches we can take here, each unfortunately having some compromises. There’s no “one-size fits all” approach here, and it’s likely that your choice will be determined by some combination of:

How your Salesforce Org is configured
The nature of the specific data point which is triggering the error
The level of time/resource available to you to resolve

Allow Pardot to bypass the Salesforce Validation Rule

The easiest way to resolve your Validation Rule issue is to just ensure that it doesn’t fire when the Pardot Connector User or Integration user updates a Salesforce record.

Questions to ask:

Is the validation relevant to Pardot forms or automations?
Would Pardot be expected to adhere to this rule?

If your answers above are all No, then you might consider this approach. This would be a code modification to the validation in Salesforce to ensure that it isn’t applied to the Pardot integration user.

Bypass the Validation Rule for legacy records only

This is a more nuanced approach than the previous option. By only allowing Pardot to bypass the Validation Rule for records created before the rule was launched, we are deciding that the validation is relevant from a Pardot perspective, however we have no way of fixing legacy records created before the rule was put in place.

Imagine if we have a million Lead or Contact records in Salesforce missing a highly individualised field such as Budget or Product Interest. We can’t necessarily infer values from other field values or scrape them online, so the only way to populate these fields would be manual population by Sales reps. Unfortunately, once a record enters Pardot’s sync queue, it’s stuck there until the record no longer triggers the validation and a sync is triggered from Pardot.

So yes, we would need to allow Pardot to bypass this validation, although what if it’s information which Pardot needs to populate going forward? In this case, we could ensure that the field is mandatory only for Leads with a Created Date after the validation was introduced.

Backfilling via Bulk update (e.g. inferrable picklist values)

Imagine that your Salesforce Administrator has introduced a Validation Rule to require the County field (You might know this as State or Region) to be populated. You might be able to use your power of inference to make reasonable assumptions about your data. If 25% of your Lead records are missing the County field, you could decide to look at what other data points you hold. Perhaps you have a Town populated, or a Postcode populated for the majority of those problematic records. In this case, we can work out a Lead’s County from a Postcode or a Town - this information is freely available from the UK Office for National Statistics.

Similarly, Telephone country codes can be deduced from a Country field. Did they fill in an Italian language web form on your landing page? That’s a reasonable assumption as a basis for populating your Language field. The possibilities are endless!

Record Backfilling via Scraping

I know what you’re thinking - it’s a high risk, high reward approach, but for extremely large datasets, information such as company Industry, Annual Revenue, Address etc are readily available online and can be enriched into Salesforce to ensure that your newly mandatory fields are populated on old records.

If you do want to use data scraping tools to populate missing field values, it will be important to determine whether or not your company has a right to use scraped data. We have to be extra careful when we are pulling in data about individuals rather than companies. GDPR covers the protection of personal data of EU citizens; If you pull in data from the EU you must be sure that the data you are pulling is GDPR compliant.

Surface non-compliant data to reps to manually fix

It’s likely that both ‘backfilling’ approaches outlined above can only take you so far. Once you’ve enriched the data in bulk as far as possible, it’s time for your Sales reps to get involved. List Views can be used to surface records to reps which need attention due to missing data points. Following the screenshot above, add your filters to show records with blank values for your key datapoints (point 1), and customise your List View columns to display the fields you expect Reps to populate. As a bonus, show the Reps how to use Inline Editing to update values without leaving the List View (point 2).

From an Admin perspective, consider Reports and Dashboards to show the progress of your data enrichment efforts. Once the data is populated with the missing values, you’ll be able to manually sync records to remove them from the Pardot Sync Error queue.