1. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
COMPARING
MARKETO AND PARDOT
Introduction
The advent of cloud-based marketing software allows
marketers to programmatically engage customers and
prospects. But with so many marketing solutions out
there, what functionalities should companies look for
when selecting the right one?
This technical white paper explores the differences
between two marketing systems: Marketo and Pardot.
Topics of Market Focus, Marketing Automation,
Analytics, Salesforce CRM Integration, and Ecosystem
will be highlighted and compared.
Market Focus
Marketo delivers marketing software built
specifically for marketers. Marketers can also build
marketing applications and tools on top of the
Marketo customer engagement platform, which
houses its database, analytics and integration
connectors. This allows a scalable, customized
approach to solving marketing objectives.
Pardot is built around the needs of the sales team.
Pardot was inherited by salesforce and is part of the
Sales Cloud (not the Marketing Cloud). The Sales
Cloud is an online sales platform, which uses Pardot
as a CRM add-on for marketing.
MARKETO PARDOT
EXAM
PLE

2. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Marketo
Marketo’s primary focus is to automate the marketing
campaign process, saving the marketing team time,
allowing them to build more customized programs, and
enabling smarter decisions about where to spend their
marketing budget. Marketo is designed to make it easy
for marketers to perform the activities that will have the
biggest impact on their business.
Program Library
Marketo comes with a library of fully loaded, ready-to-
use campaigns, workflows, landing pages, emails, forms,
and scoring models based on best practices from the
Marketing Nation – Marketo’s marketing community.
These templates provide a starting point for users to
quickly get up and running without wasting time on basic
building blocks.
Program Library vs. Nothing
Pardot doesn’t offer a program library, or any comparable
resource. This means marketers must start from scratch
to get their first campaigns out the door.
Customer Engagement Engine
Marketo runs on the powerful Customer Engagement
engine, with a simple UI designed with marketers in
mind. With the Customer Engagement engine, marketers
can simply drag content into a Smart Stream, and the
system will deliver it to the right person at the right time –
without sending duplicate content. In fact, it’s even smart
enough to know if someone’s already downloaded
something off your website, and won’t offer that asset
again. Plus, it does something no other nurturing solution
can do it makes it easy for marketers to add fresh
content by simply dragging it to the top of the stream.
Once a piece of content is at the top of the stream,
everyone in that stream will receive it next, regardless of
which content they’ve seen last. In other words,
marketers can focus on building content while the
system intelligently delivers it.
Pardot
Pardot is focused on making a very basic marketing tool
that appears easy to use, but quickly limits users due to its
lack of functionality. Rather than empowering marketers, it
hinders the marketing activities that make marketers more
productive. For example, the step-by-step process flow of
Pardot’s UI makes it easy to get started, but during later
visits, marketers are forced to repeat the same series of
individual steps – there’s no adjustment for the marketer’s
growing proficiency.
Customer Engagement Engine vs.
Limited Drip Campaigns
Pardot’s nurturing is based on simple drip programs (i.e.
send email, wait, send, wait etc.) that each have to be
created from scratch and have no built-in intelligence,
meaning Pardot cannot automatically tell if someone has
already received or downloaded a piece of content. It’s
up to the marketer to keep track of who’s received what
content, which requires managing multiple lists.
Additionally, adding fresh content to your nurture
programs is difficult. Pardot only lets you add content to
the beginning or end of a campaign. If you add it to the
beginning of the drip campaign, anyone who’s moved
beyond that step won’t see it. If you add it to the end of
a campaign, prospects near the beginning might not see
it for months – and by then, the content might not be
fresh. If you really want your content seen by everyone in
your nurture program, you’ll need to set up another list
and send it via email blast. Multiply that across multiple
campaigns, and it defeats the purpose of automating your
nurture programs.
MARKETING AUTOMATION FEATURES
EXAM
PLE

3. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Scoring
Scoring is a methodology for ranking customers and
prospects in terms of their likelihood to take certain
actions – such as making a new purchase, renewing,
or seeking out an additional product or service. Scoring
allows marketers to identify the best action to take with
these leads (e.g. which customers or prospects should be
nurtured, and which should be sent to sales for follow up).
Marketo allows marketers to assign both positive and
negative scores based on any attribute, including:
• Demographics (e.g. location, role, industry)
• Behavior (e.g. visited key web page, opened a
specific email, clicked on a specific link within an
email, attended an event)
• Timeframe (e.g. the lead took specific actions within
a specified period of time, such as visiting your
pricing page 3x in one week)
• Inactivity
• Product-specific scoring (e.g. interest in product A
vs. product B)
By allowing for this flexibility in lead scoring, marketing
is better equipped to effectively nurture leads based on
interest and fit, and to send the best leads to sales for
prioritized follow up.
Flexible Lead Scoring vs. Numerous
Scoring Limitations
Single lead score. Pardot can only associate a single
score with each lead or contact in the CRM. If a lead is
very interested in product A, and not very interested in
product B, a single lead score won’t indicate where his
or her really interest lies. Furthermore, a single lead score
won’t let you nurture people differently depending on
product interest.
One size fits all scoring. With Pardot, all behaviors and
actions are scored the same. So a student researching
your company for their college project that fills out a form
to receive a whitepaper is going to be scored the same as
a real buyer filling out a form tied to a trial offer.
No ability to determine how deeply someone is
engaging with you. With Pardot, if a VP visits your page,
and a student visits the same page, they will receive
the same score. So the lead for the VP will show up to
the sales rep as being equal in quality as compared to
the student, making the entire scoring framework very
suspect in terms of it being truly meaningful. Also, Pardot
can’t score, or trigger based on the depth of a behavior
such as a web visit. So you can’t trigger campaigns or
alerts based on someone visiting specific pages a certain
number of times over a specific period of time. So the only
option is to trigger a campaign or alert based on a single
page visit which isn’t valuable to alert sales of every time.
Cloning and Tokens
Most marketing campaigns, such as webinars, have
many moving parts. There are invite, reminder, and
follow-up emails, landing pages, forms, and workflows.
With Marketo, users can copy – or “clone”— all of these
at once with a single click. More importantly, dynamic
information such as the title, location, and date can be
automatically populated across all emails, landing pages,
forms, and workflows using tokens. This means users can
replicate not only webinars, but any successful campaign
in just minutes.
Cloning & Tokens vs. a simple “copy” feature
With Pardot, you have to copy every email, landing page,
form, and workflow individually. Then you have to go into
each and every email, landing page, form, and workflow
to modify the copy for each to change the information to
reflect the new campaign. Instead of taking minutes, it
takes hours.
EXAM
PLE

4. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Marketo
Marketo’s analytics help marketers to measure and prove
marketing ROI, understand the organization’s true revenue
potential, and optimize marketing processes. The Marketo
platform offers marketing metrics that marketers can’t
get elsewhere, on-demand, without requiring hours of
spreadsheets and number crunching.
Pardot
Pardot offers basic analytics and reporting for marketing.
Out of the box, Pardot offers a few hardwired, one-
size-fits-all reports. Obtaining more customized reports,
especially about multi-variables, is not possible or requires
third-party integration and connectors (at additional cost).
Report Customization
In Marketo, there are a number of ways to quickly
customize and filter reports. New columns can be added
to reports with the click of a button, and placed in the
order desired. And reports can be easily filtered to show
only the data that you want. For example, you can
create separate reports to show performance for email
campaigns sent to customers vs. prospects, or filter out
your own employees from a landing page conversion
report. If the data is there, marketers can use it to create
and filter a report, making the reports more meaningful for
their specific needs.
Non-customizable Reports
With Pardot, reports are hard-wired and cannot be
customized. More importantly, the ability to filter reports is
based on a completely manual and extremely error-prone
process. In Pardot, you must label every campaign and
asset with a “tag,” in order to filter those campaigns and
assets in and out of reports.
Multi-touch Revenue Attribution
Research shows that marketing typically “touches” a
deal between 7 and 30 times before a deal closes. Only
Marketo allows marketers to accurately attribute each
touch, so that every marketing effort is given credit for a
deal. Let’s say the first campaign a person engages with
is a PPC ad – that lead would be attributed to that PPC
campaign. If the lead disengaged, but then reengaged
a year later to watch a webinar, download a whitepaper,
attend a tradeshow and eventually turn into a customer,
Marketo will show you the impact and influence all of
those marketing efforts had on revenue.
Single-touch Attribution
Pardot can only give the marketing campaign that created
the lead credit. Without multi touch attribution, marketing
can’t see the whole picture of how a program performed
compared to others. In the previous example, in which
a person originally engaged with your PPC ad, but then
disengaged for a year before returning to explore more
content and become a customer, the PPC ad would get
all of the credit for the new customer. You might even
think those other campaigns aren’t working, which may
lead to some very misinformed bad decisions about how
to spend marketing dollars in the future. Pardot’s Good
Data connector gives marketers more sophisticated report
formats to choose from, but it still doesn’t allow for multi-
touch revenue reporting.
ANALYTICS AND REPORTING
EXAM
PLE

5. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Funnel Report
With Marketo, you define the stages of your marketing
funnel, and you also define what a lead is versus a
prospect. Once you’ve defined those, you can track
specific detours from the funnel in order to find and fix
leaks. And you can also look at how your conversion
rates from one funnel stage to the next are trending over
time, which allows you to gain a very deep understanding
of how your funnel is performing and where to aim your
efforts at improving results.
Non-customizable Funnel Stages
With Pardot, what qualifies someone to be a lead,
prospect, opportunity, and win is hard-wired. You can’t
add any other stages, even if your customer’s buying
cycle is very different. More importantly, Pardot’s pre-set
definition of what constitutes a lead versus a prospect
isn’t always meaningful. For example, any name added
to the database as a result of a list import or form fill is
considered a “prospect” – even though most marketers
would not consider these individuals to be prospects
at this stage. Pardot doesn’t let you track funnel leaks,
making it impossible to target and measure efforts to plug
them. Lastly, Pardot can only show funnel conversion
rates from one funnel stage to the next for a specified date
range. That means that in order to understand trends from
month to month, or quarter to quarter, the conversion
rates for each date range must be captured, and then
manually entered in a separate Excel spreadsheet. Only
then it can be graphically reported.
Alerts and Notifications
Pardot cannot take into account combinations of events
that happened within a specified period of time. Only
single actions can be seen and alerted, so multiple visits to
a website –can’t be consolidated – sales can get separate
alerts for every single visit, or nothing at all. This forces
marketing and sales to focus on individual customer
actions rather than long-term customer behavior.
Behavior Tracking and Notification
Marketo allows marketers to combine events to show
interesting behaviors (e.g. visited website 3 times this
week). Program owners can then set alerts to marketing
or sales members based on any of these behaviors (or
combination of behaviors). This allows real-time
notification of lead activity based on any combination of
custom criteria.EXAM
PLE

6. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Pardot
Even though Pardot is part of Salesforce, they remain two
separate systems and code bases. The breadth and depth
of their integration is still limited compared to Marketo’s
industry-leading offering, the result of years of both effort
and time.
Marketo
Marketo has developed a deep integration with Salesforce
CRM, using the force.com on-demand platform and APIs
for complete bi-directional synchronization of data and
action. Utilizing the latest cloud connector technology, this
best-in-class native integration takes only minutes to set
up, and allows marketing and sales teams to quickly
get started.
Marketo has consistently been recognized as having
the best integration with Salesforce by Salesforce
customers and the analyst community, and was voted
Best Marketing Automation Solution for Salesforce on the
AppExchange for the past 5 years. Marketo’s integration is
built on the same API that power thousands of integrations
across the Salesforce AppExchange ecosystem.
Companies like GE, Samsung and Google rely on
Marketo’s native integration with Salesforce.
Real-time Bi-directional Sync
Leads and contacts created in Salesforce are
automatically synced to Marketo and continuously kept in
sync for any future updates. Marketo’s high-performance
native integration can sync tens of thousands of records
per hour between Marketo and Salesforce. “Hot leads”
scored and created in Marketo are automatically delivered
and visible to Sales teams in less than a minute.
Batch Syncing
Pardot still relies on their connector to Salesforce and can
only perform a limited amount of batch syncing between
the systems in a given 24 hour period.
Self-healing
When you first set-up the connection between Marketo
and Salesforce, Marketo will automatically recognize
and map all of your fields. If you add a custom field
in Salesforce, Marketo will continue to automatically
recognize those types of changes and update accordingly.
Manually Mapping
Pardot requires users to manually map fields between the
two systems at set-up, and to manually again them again
when ongoing changes are made. This is manual process
becomes a huge time sink when entire programs require
multiple field updates.
Sales Insight
Marketo Sales Insights presents sales reps with a
prioritized list of leads based on lead score, directly from
within Salesforce. This native integration provides insight
to the sales team based on both interest and fit – all within
the Salesforce dashboard.
Lead Deck
Pardot’s Lead Deck is a tab within Salesforce, but the UI
is not designed in a way that reflects how sales people
typically navigate within Salesforce. Leads are
prioritized based on only recent activity, rather than
measures like interest or fit, because they can’t take lead
score into account.
SALESFORCE CRM INTEGRATION
EXAM
PLE

7. ©2014 Marketo, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved. Marketo vs Pardot - 062414 WHITEPAPER
Marketo
Because Marketo recognizes that a complete platform
has to integrate with an array of other applications, the
company created Marketo LaunchPoint – the first and
most comprehensive ecosystem of marketing solutions.
Hundreds of technology partners such as SlideShare,
GoToWebinar, and Twitter have developed deep API
integrations with the Marketo platform.
With LaunchPoint, marketers can customize and integrate
hundreds of the top sales and marketing applications
across all relevant categories, including analytics,
customer data, events and webinars, mobile, online ads,
social media, and video marketing. LaunchPoint acts as
a central hub for marketers to work across their tools and
ensure all relevant customer data and analytics gets tied
back into Marketo.
Pardot
Pardot is part of the Sales Cloud and does not have a
marketing specific ecosystem.
PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
Summary
Marketo offers a more comprehensive marketing platform that’s built for marketers. Pardot has basic marketing
automation tools that are focused on the needs of sales. Marketo’s functionality scales with marketing needs and
adds a level of program intelligence Pardot can’t offer.
Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading marketing software for companies of all sizes to build and sustain
engaging customer relationships. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo’s® customer
engagement platform powers a set of breakthrough applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing
from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be
optimized in real-time. Marketo’s applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing
Nation™, a thriving network of more than 250 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint™ ecosystem and over
40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern
marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Europe, Australia
and a joint-venture in Japan, Marketo serves as a strategic marketing partner to more than 3,000 large enterprises and
fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.marketo.com.
Campaign Triggering
Marketo can automatically activate campaigns in real-time
based on changes in the data value of any Salesforce
field, including custom fields. This ensures marketing
can quickly react to changes in sales, without having to
manually view and activate campaigns. Marketo has over
55 triggers out of the box, and can trigger on any behavior
to ensure the right content is delivered at the right time
based on interest.
Campaign Triggers
Pardot has a limited amount of triggers compared to
Marketo, making it less flexible when it comes to aligning
with your business process. Pardot has no native
integration at campaign level, so campaign status has to
be manually updated.
EXAM
PLE