If you’ve ever needed to put together a campaign on a tight deadline, minor things can become roadblocks – you can’t find the right templates, or you want to copy a landing page from an old campaign that you can’t locate, or you have no idea what templates are available – well, this article is for you.
As a fellow Pardot user, I can say that we have all been there. Sometimes, you inherit a disorganized Pardot org, or your team was tasked with so many requests so quickly, that you haven’t had the time to take the right steps and get organized. Hopefully, you can find some time to create your own naming conventions and organizational structure for your team to live by using these guidelines, tips, and examples.
The goal of this article is to provide you with a variety of ways to search Pardot for the assets you need. Before we dive into the naming conventions, let’s walk through some of the organization options you’ll have to help you find what you’re looking for.
Pardot Folders
Pardot folders are folders that allow you to store and organize your assets in some sort of system (yes, exactly as their name suggests). A great way to organize your folders are as follows:
Year > Marketing Activity > Campaign
Additional Pardot Folder Tips:
- If you have a high volume of campaigns you may want to add in quarters after the marketing activity to help delineate the folders one step further.
- Keep a folder at the top level for all of your files that you use over and over. I call mine the “File Library” and I store all of the files that we use on a continual basis here. It’s easy for us to find and update files this way. Note: we store all of our campaign-related images and files in the actual campaign folders (we’ll dive into this folder later)
- For campaigns, such as the website tracking campaign, consider creating a folder at the top level. The website isn’t necessarily a campaign tied to a date, it’s ongoing. So we’ll leave that at the top level and store all things associated with it there.
- Remember, if you’re using Pardot scoring categories, that everything in that folder, can be tied to a scoring category.
Pardot Tags
Pardot Tags are an underutilized feature, but they’re about to make their debut in your everyday organization.
As you know, we have limited space in the name field (there is so much that we want to squeeze in that tiny field!) Enter the tag, which will help us out tremendously.
If you have categories that you don’t need to see when searching to add a file to an email or to add a list to an email, then you can use tags. For example, a great way to use a tag is for the relevant industry/vertical, but also this could apply to audience type, location, region, or language.
If you’re tagging all of your assets with the industry, then you’ll be able to sort them just by clicking on the tag. In the example below, we’ve selected the “Media” tag, and we can now see all of the assets in our Pardot org with the Media tag. Notice that Pardot even labels the asset type for us.
Once you have your naming conventions put together you can even search through the assets. Unfortunately, you can’t search here in Pardot; however, if you click on the ‘tools’ button on the top right, you can export the data, and search in an excel file for the exact asset you need.
Pardot Tags top tip: as I mentioned, when you are working in an email template/landing page and you need to search to add an image to the email/landing page, you are not able to search by tag from that interface (you can only search by name). So, keep this in mind when you build up your tagging system.
Pardot Naming Conventions
It may not seem like a critical priority, but naming conventions are the biggest time saver and proponent of efficiency in Pardot. It’s especially important when you have several users working in your instance.
With dedicated naming conventions, they’ll be able to find assets quicker, leading to a faster turnaround time for deliverables for campaigns, as they can easily clone assets created in the past. Creating assets from scratch is a huge waste of time when you’ve already done the leg work.
Additionally, when we’re using naming conventions on files, we’re able to find them easier, and we don’t have to continuously re-add files to the account. This means you won’t have to purchase new storage. A cleaner account will not only save you time but will actually save you money in the end because you’ll be using your storage more efficiently.
I have worked with many organizations to help them figure out the best naming convention. These are some of the advice I want to give any Pardot marketers finding naming conventions challenging.
Step 1: Create Abbreviations
We all know there is a limited character in the Pardot name field. We need to first create an abbreviation system that allows us to pack more information into the name field. For example, instead of using Tradeshow, consider shortening it to TRSW. There are a few other examples below:
- Tradeshow: Trshw
- Website: Web
- Advertising: Advg
- Webinar: Wbnr
Abbreviation tips:
Make them short enough so when you’re adding files/lists to an email you can see the whole name field. Make these global and try using them for your Salesforce campaigns.
Step 2: Creating Naming Conventions
Our naming conventions in Pardot start off with the abbreviation (that we created in step one), for the marketing activity, then if it is an event we use the date, and finally the name or the description. So they’d look like the below:
- Webinar: Wbnr -YYYYMMDD – Name
- Tradeshow: Trshw -YYYYMMDD – Name
- Email Templates
- Newsletter: NSL – Product – Audience
- Blog Notification – Blog – Frequency (Daily/Weekly) – Name
Naming Convention Tips:
- Use dates only on event assets. This helps to differentiate between events that happen each year while keeping consistency in your naming conventions. Bonus: also see which event campaigns you might easily be able to archive.
- Use a character to separate the information, it makes it a bit clearer. For example, I prefer to use the dash. [Wbnr – 20211415 – Name]
- When you decide on what your naming convention will be, keep a post-it note on your PC with the name, so you don’t have to toggle back and forth when you’re in the zone building out a campaign.
- The briefer, the better. remember you can use Tags for that extra information.
- A commonly asked question is ‘why don’t we put the asset type in the naming convention?’ Well, we can find the assets by type using the native search functionality in Pardot, for example, if you’re looking for a landing page, you can click on ‘landing pages’ in Pardot rather than searching for it. When you are in a folder, you can use the icons to tell you what type of Pardot asset it is.
Example Naming Conventions
Webinar
If I were putting together a webinar, this is how I would structure my Pardot naming conventions for the webinar:
- Email Invite Wbnr – 20201201 – Pardot Benefits – Invite 1
- Registration Page Wbnr – 20201201 – Pardot Benefits – Registration
- Recipient List Wbnr – 20201201 – Pardot Benefits – Invite List
- Attended List Wbnr – 20201201 – Pardot Benefits – Attended
- Custom Redirect Wbnr – 20201201 – Pardot Benefits – Facebook
Plus, I would add Tags for ‘Industry’ and ‘Audience’.
Files in your File Library
Going back to the beginning of this guide, I mentioned we can have a file library folder. Then, we’d have a subfolder that would categorize the types of files, (ie. brochures, success stories, Icons, Logos, and etc.) For these types of files, I’d consider using the dimensions in the naming conventions to help users find the right size files while creating email templates and landing pages.
Also, these assets appear in alphabetical order when you’re adding them, so using the same type of abbreviation/name will help you find things easier.
- Brochure: Broch – Title
- Social Media: Social – 20201201 – Desc (date of post)
- Icon: Icon – 10×10 – Name
- Landing Page Head: Lphead – 100×400 – Desc
- Email Header: Ehead – 600×150 – Name *
- Logo: Logo – 10×10 – Name (Color)
- CTA: CTA – 10×10 – Name
(Remember, you can add tags to these files too!)
Final Thoughts
The goal of this organization system is to provide you with a variety of ways to locate your files in Pardot. You should be able to find your assets in three ways:
- Search and sort using the Tag, based on a category you determine such as industry.
- If you know what the asset type is, navigate to the asset type and use the search. So if it was a registration page, you can go to Landing Pages > then search for your abbreviation for webinars.
- Using your folders, you can drill down to the campaign folder to find your asset.
After you’ve gone through and come up with your naming conventions and organization guidelines, I’d recommend collaborating with your team (or anyone using Pardot) to make sure you get buy-in and recommendations. The more collaboration you have the more successful you’ll be.
As you know, there isn’t a one size fits all approach to Pardot or Salesforce, so hopefully, you are able to take from my examples and create your own naming conventions and organizational structure for your Pardot org.