What To Do By February 4, 2020 When The Chrome Browser Default Goes Live

You may have seen an “Action Required” alert at the top of your Pardot account letting you know about the Chrome Browser default going live on February 4, 2020. Here’s what to do to make sure this change doesn’t negatively impact your marketing. 

Some Background

Chrome is moving to a secure-by-default model which can hinder third-party cookies from tracking. As you know, Pardot tracks visitor and prospect activities on your website and landing pages by setting cookies on their browsers. Cookies are set to remember things like form field values when a visitor returns to your site. Pardot uses first and third-party cookies, which is standard for marketing automation tools. 

These third-party cookies help us marketers gain insights to all the previous activity a prospect had when they used to be a visitor. It provides us with a customer journey of engagement activity that is so vital to our marketing organization. 

What Must Be Done by February 4th

After February 4, 2020, your domains need to be SSL and HTTPS enabled in order to have third-party cookies tracked successfully to Pardot. If your domains already have these enabled, then you do not have to take action.

You can check this by going to Admin > Domain Management in the legacy pi.pardot.com. Or,  if using the Pardot lightning app, go to Pardot Settings > Domain Management. Under the Tracker, domains look at the SSL status and the HTTPS status. If your domains do not read “enabled”, then you will need to take action by February 4th. 

Steps To Take

Before enabling SSL, you want to make sure that all of your marketing assets load to HTTPS. If some of them load to HTTP, then once SSL is enabled, these marketing assets may not load properly and visitors to the asset could receive a security warning.  

We highly advise doing an audit of your assets that are live and have your creative team on standby to edit them. A few things to look out for are:

• Any http links that you have used as redirects on forms (those will NOT update automatically)
• Any images or links embedded in emails and landing pages that point to HTTP - you may have to manually update those on the back end of your html

To enable SSL, click the cog icon next to the domain then click Enable SSL. Please note that the domain must be validated first. The SSL enablement will take about 15 minutes. Here’s the Salesforce help article for SSL enablement for further assistance.

Before switching your tracker domain to HTTPS, be sure that your company website is HTTPS in your Pardot account settings. Then just like for SSL enablement, click on the cog next to the domain and select default HTTPS. Here’s the Salesforce help article for HTTPS enablement. 

Questions?

There you have it, you have ensured that your tracker domains are SSL and HTTPS-enabled, so that you can keep getting that rich third-party cookie data to better track your buyer behavior. 

If you have any questions about this update, you can email [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help. 

And as always...Stay hydrated #Ohana...