Recently I was working with a client who has the Pardot Growth Edition, which means some features are not available. Scoring Categories being one of them. This lead me to an alternative solution for the client, Pardot Custom Engagement Rating. Albeit not quite as robust as Scoring Categories but gave them something to think about for now.

Click here to find out more about Pardot Scoring Categories.

The solution I proposed involved a Custom Field, Page Actions, and Automation Rules. Based on the interactions taken by the prospect when visiting certain pages on our company website, this will then drive the Engagement Rating Status and will then highlight how engaged that prospect is. I have also set a 90-day re-entry for my rules as that is the criteria when I want to re-evaluate my prospect’s engagement.

Now let’s dive into how I built the Pardot Custom Engagement Rating solution.

Creating your Custom Field

The first thing we need to do is create our Custom Field which we will use to store our Pardot Custom Engagement Rating. Depending on your requirements this can be created in Salesforce and Pardot or Pardot only.

Creating Page Actions in Pardot

Page actions are triggered when a prospect views a webpage that has your Pardot tracking code embedded.

How many page actions you need really depends on how much tracking you want to carry out. For the purpose of this blog, I am using 3-page actions.

As you can see below I have applied a TAG to the page action so I can stamp the prospect record. You will need to apply a TAG for each page action you create. For this use case, I have used Home Page View, Journal and Quickstart

Creating our Automation Rules

Automation Rules are repeatable, criteria-based rules that find matching prospects and apply actions to them.

Now the fun part begins in mapping out how we are going to move a prospects Engagement Rating. From Warm to Hot, Hot to Red Hot and hopefully we never get to Cold. But there’s a chance.

First Automation Rule: Engagement Status – Warm

The first rule here is checking if the prospect has accessed any of our page actions using the TAGS we set earlier.

Second Automation Rule: Engagement Status – Hot

The second rule here is checking if the prospect has accessed any two of our page actions using the TAGS we set earlier.

Third Automation Rule: Engagement Status – Red Hot

The third rule here is checking if the prospect has accessed all of our page actions using the TAGS we set earlier.

Red Hot Customer who is now fully engaged.

Fourth Automation Rule: Engagement Status – Cold

The fourth rule here is checking if the prospect’s Last Activity is greater than 90 Days, if so set the status to Cold and remove all the previous applied TAGS. We remove the TAGS so we can start again to track the engagement.

THE RESULTS: LET’S TRACK THE ENGAGEMENT STEP BY STEP

Due to the way we have set the Automation Rules up for our Pardot Custom Engagement Rating solution. The engagement rating status can only ever move Cold to Warm, Warm to Hot, or Red Hot and back to Cold.

One TAG

Prospect has visited just one page and fired one page action.

Two TAGS

Prospect has visited two pages and fired two page action.

Three TAGS

Prospect has visited all three pages and fired all page actions.

No Activity – Cold Rating

Prospect no activity in the last 90 days. Automation Rule met to reset my Pardot Custom Engagement Rating to COLD.

Now we have gone full circle with Pardot Custom Engagement Rating. Because we allow prospects to meet the automation rules more than once, we can simply just go again.

Thanks for taking the time to read through the article and hope you found it insightful.

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