When you work in marketing automation, you get to see lots of data. Data is all over the place. It’s in your hair and between your toes. We are all striving to be data-driven marketers, but the data deluge reminds me of what John Naisbitt famously said 40 years ago: “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge”. As marketers we need the right data at the right time. Fortunately, for Pardot users, there’s an amazing feature that does just that: the Engagement History Dashboard.

Engagement History Dashboard, launched last year, gives sales and marketing users the power to explore and visualise important data. It’s a Lightning Component that brings Pardot data into Salesforce. Basically, it’s the reporting tool that marketing automation professionals have been waiting for all their professional lives. Engagement History Dashboard shows how marketing is making money for the company and how marketing influences sales opportunities. Isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Engagement History Dashboard tells sales what buttons to push

You can look at an Engagement History Dashboard from two different lenses:

• How are the accounts that sales are chasing, engaging with our marketing campaigns?
• How well do our campaigns perform relative to each other?

Your sales colleagues will primarily be interested in the engagement of their customers with marketing. The Engagement History Dashboard delivers sales a wealth of information on their accounts. Who are the most active contacts at that account? What products or services are they interested in? What assets of ours do they engage with? Sometimes, customers will pretend not to be interested in a certain product, while their engagement history shows the opposite. A sales rep can immediately take action based on this information and send off an email to their contact person. Make life even easier on sales (isn’t that our life’s mission after all?) by providing email templates they can use. If your sales team is into Account Based Marketing, the Engagement History Dashboard will show them exactly what buttons to push and what levers to pull to get the right message to the right contact person.

Compare campaigns and advanced campaign reporting with custom report types

As a marketer who wants to get the best bang for your buck, setting up Engagement History ( prerequisite for the Engagement History Dashboards) allows you to compare campaigns and their associated assets to one another. This is achieved via creating custom report types to link campaigns to emails, links, forms etc . Some examples:

• Compare what List Emails have the highest open rate based on their subject lines
• Compare what Forms have the highest response rate
• Combine Campaigns with Forms, Landing Pages, List Emails, Marketing Links etcetera and investigate which campaigns resonate most with customers

Before Engagement History Dashboard, making these comparisons was a lot more time intensive as it necessitated going into different areas of Pardot to pull up the information. Now it’s all together in one view.

Engagement History Dashboard is easy to set up

The beauty of Engagement History Dashboard is that it is not hard to set up at all. You may need a hand from the Salesforce Admin to get everything going, and, of course, you need to have Connected Campaigns running as well as Pardot Lightning. Once all that is done, a wizard guides you through the installation process. A note of caution: you need a good level of marketing automation hygiene to get the most of Engagement History Dashboard. Your campaign hierarchy (grandparent, parent, child) and the naming of them, need to make sense. Otherwise comparing campaigns will be harder to do. Also super important: sales needs to add contact roles to opportunities to really get the link between won opportunities and campaigns. This is the glue between what marketing is doing and an opportunity.

Engagement History Dashboard brings marketing and sales data together at last, and literally on the same page! So? What are you still waiting for? Why are you still reading this? Get started now and ensure you get the marketing kudos you totally deserve.