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Marketers

Introduction to Pardot Sandboxes [Infographic]

By Lucy Mazalon

April 20, 2021

Yes, this may have been the day you’ve been waiting for: Developer Sandboxes for Pardot have arrived. Sandboxes function as test or staging environments, where you can build and test configuration without risking anything going horribly wrong and disrupting business operations.

As soon as the Pardot Summer ’20 features were announced, I launched a Twitter poll to see what Pardot Admins and Consultants were interested in.

The results were overwhelmingly weighted towards one Pardot feature: Pardot Sandboxes.

Pardot Sandboxes will, no doubt, become essential in every Pardot Admin’s work.

Here are the facts you need to know about Pardot Sandboxes – the what, how, who and when.

 

UPDATE: Pardot Sandbox now supports all Sandboxes, not just Full Salesforce Sandbox.

What are Pardot Sandboxes?

Sandboxes are a copy of your ‘live’ Pardot account (production) and function as test ‘staging’ environments. You can build and test configuration and its impact on data without risking anything going horribly wrong and disrupting business operations!

Some examples of things you may want to check before launching them live:

  • New automation (eg. Salesforce Flows or Pardot Automation Rules),
  • Integrations using the Pardot API,
  • User access based on permissions,
  • Feature updates (eg. Salesforce User Sync).

How to Create a Pardot Sandbox

Pardot Sandboxes will:

  • Function like a Pardot business unit
  • Be provisioned from a Salesforce Full Sandbox

Steps to ’Spin up’ a Sandbox:

  1. Login to a Salesforce Full sandbox
  2. Uninstall and delete the B2BMA managed package
  3. Install a Pardot Sandbox managed package
  4. Configure the Connected App and Integration User permissions

Find the full instructions linked here.

What They’re Not

Bear this in mind when getting started:

  • There are no change sets. You can’t move data or configuration from the live environment into the Sandbox*, or vice versa. You must manually re-create any changes.

*after the Sandbox has been refreshed.

Sandboxes don’t support:

  • Email sending
  • Salesforce Engage
  • B2B Marketing Analytics.

Who: Can I Get a Pardot Sandbox?

While this is big news, don’t get carried away until you’ve read the small print. You will require the following licenses:

  • Pardot: Pardot Advanced edition (or Pardot Premium with the v2 connector).
  • Salesforce: Unlimited or Performance edition (note: Full Sandboxes available at an additional cost with any Salesforce edition)

Find the considerations linked here.

When Will Pardot Sandboxes be Available?

The Salesforce Summer ’20 release will happen on July 10th & 18th.

Your date depends on your Salesforce instance.

Find our guide linked here.

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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Comments:

    Nicky
    June 03, 2020 10:18 am
    Hey Lucy - about time!! Do you happen to know if you can enable Connected Campaigns in a Pardot sandbox or if it still can only be done in Production only? Thank you!
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    June 03, 2020 2:21 pm
    Hey Nicky, absolutely, tell me about it! I'm not 100% on this one, I assume yes (but it's dangerous to assume). I do know that they will function just like a business unit if that helps at all?
    Reply
    Lindsey Mark
    April 01, 2021 2:31 am
    Update - Pardot Sandbox now supports all Sandboxes, not just Full Salesforce Sandbox as it did in the Beta.
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    April 01, 2021 10:40 am
    Thanks Lindsey for the heads up, that's great news!
    Reply
    Ross Hopkins
    April 06, 2021 7:06 am
    Hey Lucy, This is a really helpful post, thanks, We don't utilise Business Units as yet but I've been a little confused why all support and blog articles on sandboxes mention them. If we have a full sandbox org and attempt to create a Pardot sandbox, does it require you to setup at least one business unit to get fully up and running? Thanks!
    Reply
    Lindsey Mark
    April 12, 2021 2:51 pm
    Instructions have updated, managed package deletion not needed. https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.pardot_sf_connector_sandbox.htm&type=5
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    April 19, 2021 8:17 am
    Hi Ross, thank you - you're welcome. Business units (as you likely know) are a Pardot feature that is especially needed by enterprise-level companies. Adding business units into the mix adds extra considerations to pretty much everything config related you're doing in Pardot, so that's my guess what you are seeing BUs mentioned everywhere. Also, with each BU, you get a sandbox which is a big value add of BUs themselves. Hope that helps!
    Reply
    Steve
    June 17, 2022 12:40 pm
    @Lucy Mazalon - do you know of any good ways to seed a Pardot sandbox. We use business units and and manually adding all of the config again every time the SB is refreshed is painful.... any ideas? Thank you.
    Reply

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