Pardot Automation Rules & Page Actions

Pardot automation rules and page actions are tools that you can use to make changes to prospects in your database passively. Let’s look at what they’re used for:

• Automation Rules: These rules are among your most potent in all of Pardot short of sending autoresponder emails, setting profiles, deleting prospects, and creating lists they can perform virtually ever Pardot prospect action. They are extremely powerful and have countless use cases. They run continuously in the background and will fire every time they find a prospect that meets their criteria.
• Page Actions: These actions are associated with pages on your site or other sites that have your Pardot tracking code. They can be used a variety of different ways, such as increasing the score of a prospect who visits a specific page, change field values, and more.

How to use Automation Rules effectively

Depending on what tier of Pardot you have, you will either have 50, 100, or 150 automation rules that you can have in your Pardot instance. You can use them to accomplish a variety of tasks such as:

• Assigning a sales rep to a prospect once they’ve passed a certain point threshold
• If a prospect hasn’t been active in so many weeks, decay their score to adjust for their level of interest
• Notify a specific user if a particular combination of fields are marked on the prospect
• Sending out emails on birthdays or their anniversary since becoming a prospect
• Assigning prospects to a Salesforce campaign

The possibilities are pretty endless, for example, here’s one that we use internally. Because we use a lot of UTM links in our Google ads our Pardot prospects will generate with a source that says “google.” However, that wasn’t particularly descriptive when we were reading over our data, so we created a Pardot rule that did the following:

1. Check if Visitor Google Analytics parameter ‘medium’ is ‘paid.’
2. Check if Visitor Google Analytics parameter ‘source’ is ‘google.’
3. Check if ‘Source’ is ‘google.’
4. If all these are true, change to Source to ‘Google Ad.’

As you can see, this is a relatively simple Automation rule we leave running all the time to make sure that any prospects that we received through Google Ads are marked appropriately for our monthly reports.

You may find as you build out your Pardot instance that you have similar issues where incoming data isn’t the way you want it formatted, and that can be one of the great uses of automation rules. Just be aware that if you have many cases like this, it may be a waste of your automation rules if you’re doing this for every channel you have.

Page Actions

Page actions are an automation tool you can use to apply changes to a prospect when they visit pages on your website or any webpage that’s embedded with your Pardot tracking code. A typical use case for page actions would be to apply score changes for a page that you consider valuable for converting your prospect, and can even be applied to specific scoring categories.

For Example:

Let’s say you’re a wholesale hammer and screwdriver supplier; you may have your hammer order form page as a key page you want to use to distinguish hammer purchasers versus screwdriver purchasers. On each page you could create an action that not only increases their score but increases their score in a specific scoring category, allowing you to discern what type of customer this prospect is more easily.

Additionally, when setting up page actions like in the example above, you can also mark “Priority Pages”. These priority pages will show up in prospect activities ungrouped from other page views, so you can clearly identify if they visited those specific pages at a glance. This can be very helpful when you have a multi-sided business.

Beyond score adjustments and priority pages, we can also create completion actions. When a user visits a specific page with our page action, we can also trigger other actions such as adding tags to the prospect, adding the prospect to a list, assigning them to a user, and more.

If used correctly, automation rules and page actions can be handy tools for helping you organize your prospects and move them through your sales pipeline. Now that we’ve explored automation rules and page actions let’s move on to our final section, the Pardot engagement studio.