Every Salesforce admin is well-versed in page layout best practices. The aim is to optimize Salesforce pages for different personas around the organization. Each team will use a set of fields, Lightning components, and buttons relevant to their role.
Pardot has many ways it can appear in Salesforce, and more are being added with every release. Where should Pardot components come into the picture?
Lightning pages offer an admin such flexibility for designing pages using drag-and-drop functionality – but it’s a fine balance to strike. You should take advantage of all Salesforce has to offer for user productivity, yet avoid adding too much to your page layouts that quickly turn into clutter.
I recently posed this question to the London Pardot user group: “Should you add everything to your Salesforce page layouts, and eliminate what you don’t need. Or, is less always more?”
Here are my thoughts on designing pages that including Pardot elements but work towards a better Salesforce UI.
List Out Components, Buttons, Fields
The starting point I would recommend is to make a list of all the Lightning components and buttons applicable to Pardot and marketing teams, by object.
Here are some Pardot-specific Lightning components and actions to get you started.
- Lead/contact: Engagement History, Engagement History Dashboard, add to Pardot list.
- Account: Engagement History Dashboard, Matched Leads component.
- Campaign: Engagement History Dashboard, Engagement Metrics Dashboard.
- Opportunity: Engagement History Dashboard.
These are listed in more detail on the guide below:
You will then repeat the process for fields, however, an advanced warning as this is a more time-consuming exercise! There will be certain fields that are related to lead generation, such as lead source, that are not part of the Pardot AppExchange package.
When you have that compiled, you need to decide which user profiles need to see each component/button/fields. Here’s hoping that the profiles in your Salesforce org have been set up to neatly group the users to how you need them to be!
Don’t assume that anything to do with Pardot is only for user under the ‘marketing’ profile. For example, the profile the business development reps sit under would need to see the Engagement History component on leads/contacts to give the context on how their prospects have interacted with marketing content up until that point to help steer a relevant conversation.
Dynamic Forms for Page Layouts
Dynamic Forms are all the rage! The release of Dynamic Forms means that it’s never been easier to customise the Salesforce interface to your team’s needs, used “to create user centric, intuitive page layouts that display the right information at the right time – [compared to] the closest resolution we’ve had is to create multiple page layouts and different profiles, which is labour and config intensive.”
Here’s why Dynamic Forms are the answer to user interface design challenges:
- Place fields anywhere on the layout (without needing to add them to the traditional “Details” tab),
- Use visibility rules to make fields and components appear and disappear based on criteria you choose,
- Improve page load times.
Read more in our Dynamic Forms tutorial, plus some of the current limitations.
Multiple Page Layouts?
If your org is not up to speed with Dynamic Forms (or their current limitations are blocking your total transformation) then you may find there is more than one page layout for an object. Where this is the case you need to understand the purpose of each of your page layouts – in other words, which page layouts relate to which user profiles.
This will mean that you can add components to only the applicable page layouts. If there is only one page layout, it may be time to consider creating a new page layout to avoid ‘cluttering’ the other page layouts with Pardot components not relevant to every user.
Above: how two lead page layouts (in this case to distinguish between two record types) are assigned to different profiles.
Marketing Related Lists
Related Lists display records related to the record you are viewing, as a list. A few examples that come to mind for marketers are:
- Campaign history on leads/contacts
- Campaign members on campaigns
- Landing pages, forms, emails, marketing links, snippets on campaigns
- Campaign influence on opportunities
- Contact roles on opportunities
Whether you include related lists on marketing page layouts will depend, surprise surprise, who the page is intended for. It’s worth mentioning that even if a page uses Dynamic Forms, the related lists will still be controlled by the traditional Salesforce page layout.
When you edit Lightning record pages, you have the option to add all related lists all at once, or specify which related lists you want to display on the page, the “Related list – single” component. So consider removing the ‘all related lists’ component for marketing users who don’t need to see all related lists (and vice versa for other users who don’t need to see the marketing related lists):
Use Page Tabs
When you edit a Lightning page, you can add tabs to hide any information that users may only need to occasionally look at, that may be considered clutter on the main page layout. This is a great trick to keep handy if either your admin hasn’t enabled Dynamic Forms, or your user profiles do not reflect how you would like to group your user audiences.
By creating a custom tab, you can add any label for your tab, for example ‘Engagement History’ for all the Pardot prospect engagement data:
Open up a Feedback Loop
After adding a component to a page layout, the best way to figure out if the component is being used is simply, to ask the users!
Some organisations (especially orgs with many users and teams) may choose to formalise this through observation and/or documentation. However, I believe that using a Chatter poll to capture the thoughts of your fellow users, or even setting yourself a reminder to raise it in the next team meeting, is sufficient enough!
Remove Legacy Pardot Sections
Previous Salesforce interface features for Pardot have become legacy, and replaced with new Lightning-ready features.
It’s best practice to remove any page layout sections that have replacements; not only do they look much better, their functionality and reliability also trumps their previous versions.
Some examples of components to remove, and their replacements are:
- “Pardot” app from the App Launcher (the iframed app) → replaced by “Pardot B2B Marketing Automation” (AKA the Pardot Lightning App).
- Pardot Activities (Visualforce component) → replaced by “Engagement History” on leads/contacts.
- Pardot Social Data → replaced by “Engagement History” on leads/contacts.
- Pardot List Membership → replaced by “Add to Pardot List”/“Add to Engagement Studio List” on leads/contacts record and list views.
Summary
Pardot has many ways it can appear in Salesforce, and more are being added with every release. You should take advantage of all Salesforce has to offer for user productivity, yet avoid adding too much to your page layouts that quickly turn into clutter. This is where following page layout best practices come in to the picture.
The recent talk did based on “Complete List of Pardot in Salesforce” had three main takeaways from it that give us the ideal conclusion here:
- Saying ‘Pardot in Salesforce’ can mean many different things (which you have seen by this point in the post!)
- Pardot has been moving closer to Salesforce in the past 2+ years (meaning marketers can leverage the Lightning experience interface to interact with Pardot data)
- Previous features have become legacy, replaced with new functionality (so remove that old page clutter!)
