Pardot Audit Guide - 5 Steps to Automation Greatness

Audit. It’s kinda a scary word but something that needs to be done and done regularly. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of the new year but it’s a perfect time to take a second look at what’s really going on! Us marketers cannot be effective if 1. Our systems are cluttered or 2. We don't understand the relationship between what we're doing and how it's impacting our prospects!

Here I’ll list things I look at when performing a system audit.

1. Folder Structure

This is really important because if you’re out sick or trying to enjoy a vacation you’ll want your colleagues to be able to track things down without phoning you every second. Also - when things need to be updated or rebranded, you're not scrambling to find everything.

Here’s how I do it

2018 - Year (Grandparent folder) > Jan - Month (Parent Folder > Each Campaign in that month (Child Folder) - And within this folder is all your assets tied to that campaign :) Every. Single. One!

You can also add an "Active" or "Inactive" tag to these assets to indicate they're not being used.

2. Nomenclature -

Your naming conventions are just as important as folder structure so you can find things! I typically structure it something like MM-DD-YYY - Campaign Name but it really doesn't matter as long as you’re consistent and it makes logical business sense. I try my best to keep asset naming in alignment with what's in salesforce IE: Salesforce Campaign Name = Pardot Form / Pardot Campaign Name / List etc...

3. Active and Inactive Database

You need to know who and what is in your database! Is it full of spam? Are those who expressed interest being contacted? Are people opening your emails!?!?!?

Active vs Inactive - I love running Dynamic lists in various “day” segments. 30,60,90 day lists typically cover a good chunk of time. Another way to break it down is by quarter!

If you really want to get creative you can stack on a created date to this list to find out if prospects created 2 months ago are still engaged a month later.

Would look something like this.

This would render prospects that entered pardot 30 - 60 days out but are still active within the last 30 days. You could look at several different segments to figure out when that engagement dropoff point is happening. Absolutely play around with that! Just remember this is a rolling number and will change/update every day.

4. Prospects that have NEVER been emailed!

Now you might assume that all your prospects/leads have been emailed at least once, right?! Well here’s how you can find out! It’s a little tricky and involves two lists!

Dynamic List 1: HAS been emailed at least ONCE in the last year (or whatever time frame you’d like to check!

Dynamic list 2 - Is NOT a member of List 1

5. Old or Bad Emails

Your database over time will get bad or outdated email addresses, this is just a fact of life. Keeping things clean can improve open rates and overall engagement! You’ll also feel a lot better when clicking that “Send” button. I use a tool called Briteverify - https://www.briteverify.com/ - I scrub a list to get the status back of the email addresses and clean out the ones that are bad! I highly recommend creating a Custom Field to store this email status in! If you cannot part with the records - you can always add them to a suppression list from that custom field value!

There you have it! That's the 5 things I review when I'm trying to clean thing up and get to know a database a little better.

Did I miss anything? What do you look at when you perform an audit?