Campaigns are set in order to promote a product or service via multiple channels, there is an end goal to be met, and whether that goal has been achieved is measured through pre-defined metrics.

PARDOT CAMPAIGNS

Campaigns in Pardot track your prospect’s first touch point–for example viewing a landing page or a webpage with Pardot tracking code, clicking on a tracked link or filling out a Pardot form. All the marketing assets in Pardot are related to Pardot campaigns, as soon as a prospect interacts with one of these assets, their campaign is automatically set. Each Pardot prospect can be in only one Pardot campaign. i.e. a prospect has many to one relationship with its campaign. A pardot campaign can have multiple prospects associated to it. You could call campaigns the ‘first touch point’ of the prospect to any of your marketing asset. A Pardot Campaign would answer the question: ’What brought the prospect to the Pardot Database?’

Using Pardot campaigns allows you to track campaigns created in Pardot.

• You can see how many prospects are associated with your marketing campaigns.
• When you create a Pardot landing page, Pardot adds tracking code specific for that campaign to the page.
• Every marketing element built in Pardot is associated with a Pardot Campaign. These Marketing Assets include landing page, email template, forms, tracked links etc. You can group and filter your Pardot reports by campaign to determine which marketing assets converted the most prospects.

SALESFORCE CAMPAIGNS

Salesforce campaigns and the leads/contacts has many to many relationships. i.e. One Lead can be associated to multiple Campaigns as well as one Campaign can have multiple leads under it. These campaigns can be associated to your leads or contacts at any point in their lifecycle. Association of campaigns in salesforce to leads or contacts are set through association rules or through Pardot’s completion actions or automation and Engagement studio actions. Salesforce campaigns are linked directly to the sales funnel which helps in reporting, membership of campaign and the status are easily tracked, and you can even measure how effective your campaigns are in closing deals.

In short Salesforce Campaigns are multi-attribution and Leads or Prospects can have multiple Salesforce Campaigns at the same time. A Salesforce Campaign answers the question ‘What marketing activities influenced the prospects to convert or buy from us?’

Maintaining different types of campaigns can be confusing. Since the Spring 18’ Release it is now possible to connecting Pardot and Salesforce campaigns — this basically means that you can finally create, manage and report on your campaigns in one place. While your Pardot prospect record will still show which campaign brought that prospect in, you can then see their ongoing campaign activity and engagement in your Salesforce org.

It is sometimes tempting to call emails, lists, and Engagement Studio programs as “campaigns”. However, while all of these falls under specific marketing campaigns, neither Salesforce nor Pardot considers these individual assets as campaigns in their own right. When we discuss about connecting campaigns, we are referring to the records from the Campaigns tabs in Pardot and Salesforce, respectively–these are the two records that will be connected and synced.

Below infographic explains the scope of campaigns in each of the tools.