Marketo and Pardot - A comparative review

If there is one thing that will create a lot of discussion among marketing operations professionals, it is the topic of “what Marketing Automation Platform (or MAP) should I choose?”  This can be a difficult question to answer, because each major platform has a dedicated advocate base that will tout the major benefits of their platform of choice and downplay weaknesses (at least publicly).  It may be a decision you are facing as an organization or a consideration you are having to consider when choosing an organization.  

Two popular platforms in the market are Adobe Marketo Engage (known simply as “Marketo” - the original brand name - by practitioners) and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly branded as “Pardot”).  This blog will focus on a basic comparison of the two platforms and provide an objective, as possible, analysis of the pros of each tool and things you should consider with each platform. 

One note:  I am an Adobe Marketo Engage Champion so I do admit that I have a bias in this discussion.  I am also a user and expert in Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM, and have worked in client engagements involving Pardot.  My goal is to be as unbiased as possible because I believe that you have to make a decision that meets your business needs and at the end of the day you have to weigh the benefits and the areas for consideration of each tool on your own.  

A history of the tools

Pardot was founded in 2007 in Atlanta, GA by David Cummings and Adam Blitzer as a offering in the newly budding marketing automation space, and was ultimately purchased by Salesforce in 2013 through their acquisition of ExactTarget, who purchased Pardot themselves six months earlier and were subsequently acquired by Salesforce, the leading CRM vendor.  Salesforce had incorporated the ExactTarget Email Service Provider (ESP) tool into their Marketing Cloud as SFMC (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and Pardot was sold as the B2B marketing tool within Salesorce’s Marketing Cloud brand umbrella.  Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an umbrella brand for Salesforce that incorporates their marketing tool acquisitions over their history, including ExactTarget, Radian6, Buddy Media, and others.  Both of the tools acquired in the ExactTarget acquisition have been incorporated into the Salesforce User Experience (UX) and are commonly bundled with their popular Sales Cloud (CRM) and Service Cloud (CX) products.  Salesforce recently rebranded Pardot as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Experience (word count wasn’t considered, obviously) in 2022. 

Marketo was founded in 2006 in San Mateo, CA by founders Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi to be a powerful user-friendly and cost-effective alternative to the leading enterprise player at the time, Eloqua (now owned by Oracle).  Marketo’s claim to fame, at its founding, was its simplified user experience, a seamless integration to Salesforce.com, the color purple, the revenue reporting engine, and a raving fan community known as Marketing Nation.  The company acquired Crowd Factory (social), InsightEra (Real Time Personalization), and Bizible (Marketo Measure), during a corporate history of going IPO and being purchased by Vista Partners before eventually being acquired by Adobe in 2018.  Today, as part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo is integrated into the larger Adobe Experience Platform, which is the the most comprehensive suite of marketing tools available on the market today.  Adobe has branded the tool sets as Marketo Engage (engagement) and Marketo Measure (advanced revenue reporting), within the larger Adobe Experience Platform set of offerings. 

Why these tools are considered

Where Pardot shines - Why it is considered

1. Salesforce relationship and common UX:  Companies who are Salesforce shops will often look at Pardot as part of a bundled offering with the Salesforce CRM tool they are using, which organizations using Salesforce CRM can get favorable price considerations for.  Additionally, the user experience and metaphors are very similar between the two offerings, so if the organization wants to “standardize around Salesforce” this offering is attractive from that perspective.
2. Engagement Studio:  The “journey builder” tool within Pardot is quite cool and visually appealing.  It is easy to use and provides marketers with visual reporting on journey performance within its canvas.  Most often, when you are seeing screenshots or demos of Pardot, the Engagement Studio will be highlighted. 
3. Simplified Operations:  Most often, organizations that choose Pardot have very straightforward marketing operational needs (this isn’t always the case, there is a very active Pardot community on MarketingOps.com).  The basics of the tool (form and journey builders) are intuitive and have a low learning curve.  From my experience, I would describe Pardot as an “appliance” tool rather than a platform, which is appealing for smaller marketing teams that need to get campaigns out the door quickly.  

Where Marketo shines - Why it is considered

1. Simplicity and Scalability:  Marketo is built around three metaphors that, once understood, allow a marketer a tremendous amount of flexibility and ability to scale.  The three metaphors are:
   1. The Smart Campaign (workflow unit):  This object is a self-contained unit that can execute any triggered or batch action in the platform, and contains a tab-based workflow of a Smart List (query), Flow (activities for qualified members), Schedule (qualification rules), and results (auditing of the workflow performance).  This workflow unit can be used in many ways to create marketing executions.
   2. The program (campaign unit):  This object is a mirror of the Campaign object in the Salesforce Sales Cloud and supports nurturing, batch email, event/webinar, and custom campaign types.  Programs serve as a “funnel” for every marketing tactic that a marketer would engage in, is organized by progression statuses that inform a marketer as to where in the camping lifecycle an audience member lives in, and can sync 1:1 with a Salesforce Campaign (via a standard or custom sync).  Programs can also be “cloned” (copied) in a way that copies all of the asset and workflow references from the original into the new program, which enables operations teams the ability to create a “template” of a program and speed campaign creation for new commonly-used tactics very easily through the creation of a “COE” (Center of Excellence) set of templatized programs that contain 80-90% of the campaign functionality pre-built.  
   3. Folders and tokens (inheritance):  Marketing activities within Marketo are structured in an cascading folder structure, where custom “tokens” can be created and inherited/overridden in a nested folder structure to allow for mass-customization of assets (emails & landing pages) and workflows. 
2. CRM Integration:  Marketo Engage has the most robust CRM integrations on the market (including the integration with Salesforce!), supporting a “shared database” integration structure with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and others.  Additionally, the Marketo Sales Insight and Sales Insight Actions tools are great sales enablement/intelligence tools that marketers can use to prioritize leads for Sales in the CRM.
3. Lead Lifecycle + Scoring:  The flexibility of the Marketo platform and the Revenue Molder enables marketing operations to create an operational structure to report on the customer journey (the “Lead Lifecycle”) that can meet any organization’s specifications.  Additionally, Marketo enables marketers with the ability to customize scoring through an ability to create multiple “score” fields and organize custom scoring models within operational programs to support multiple ways of prioritizing (scoring) people based on persona, product interest, or another dimension that may be of value to a company. 
4. Bundled offerings and API:  Adobe has incorporated some key marketing technologies into the Adobe Experience Platform that are of value to marketers as an included offering for Marketo, including chatbots with meeting scheduling and interactive webinars.   Additionally, they have made significant investments in the Launchpoint ecosystem and the API, which enables a marketing technologist with the ability to integrate any API-enabled tool into Marketo and incorporate it into the marketing ecosystem.  

What to consider if you select one of these tools:

Pardot considerations:

• Divergent workflows:  Pardot has multiple avenues by which workflows, such as data value changes, pushes of sales intelligence to the CRM, and score changes can be executed.  These mechanisms in the tool are:

• Inside Engagement Studio journeys 
• Within Pardot Automation Rules 
• In Page Actions
• In Form Completion Actions and Form Handler completion actions. 

These multiple ways of executing workflows provide a lot of flexibility in how a marketing operations professional can execute workflow, but it can confuse operators when it comes to troubleshooting issues, as you have to understand what apparatus a workflow is being run from.  If you are creating operational workflows in Pardot, I recommend that you a.) choose a consistent methodology for how workflows will be run, create detailed documentation by workflow type as to how your core operational workflows (lifecycle, scoring, data management, campaign activation) are being executed.  It can be very easy to create “spaghetti” in this type of environment, so consistency (choosing one way to execute significant workflows such as scoring and lifecycle data updates, for example) and clear documentation is an imperative.  

• Operational limitations:  The best way to think about Pardot is as a marketing automation appliance (versus a “platform” which has a lot of flexibility), which is designed to do a few things very well (aka: creating journey-focused campaigns) but is very limited in many areas that marketing operators require.  Some of these limitations include:

• Limited field types:  For example, the date/time data type is not supported in Pardot.  Also, if you are used to working in Marketo, you cannot create multiple “score” field types (see below). 
• Boilerplate lifecycle:  The Pardot lifecycle report is based on a funnel model that is built around a set of standard rules and specific stages.  This model can be customized somewhat, but if you are used to having the ability to develop a “Revenue Model” with a custom lifecycle within Marketo to model the specific lifecycle journey your buyers follow, this capability is not available in the core tool. 
• Single scoring model:  You do not have the ability to create multiple scoring models within Pardot with respect to either Score (behavior) or Grades (demographics), so it’s important to be operationally aligned on a unified scoring system if you are going to use Pardot’s lead scoring.  
• Canned reports:  Pardot includes a set of standard reports in their Account Engagement Reports tab, but does not include the capability within Pardot alone to create custom reports.  

The operational limitations within Pardot do need to be considered when making a decision to purchase or if you are managing an organization using Pardot. Within the Salesforce ecosystem, there are ways to work around Pardot’s limitations with custom workflows within Salesforce Sales Cloud (using Apex and Process flows) as well as including a workflow engine such as LeanData into your stack that can be used to execute these more complex workflows on behalf of Pardot (these do need to be orchestrated, but it is doable). 

Concerning reporting, because is tightly integrated with the Campaign object in Salesforce, there is some opportunity to create customizations in the CRM with Campaigns to create these flows and reporting structures.  It is recommended that any ad-hoc and complex reporting needs you have be conducted using Salesforce reports and dashboards, which are more robust (Marketo shops can also go this route depending on how the business consumes reports, although Marketo has a lot of reporting flexibility), and BI dashboards such as can be built in DOMO or Tableau, which offer a lot of capability to transform and visualize data.  This need to push data into Salesforce CRM for reporting, via campaigns and other custom data pushes, will require a tight alignment with your Sales Operations and your Salesforce admin team, so be sure they are aligned with your goals as you build out your reporting structure if you are using Pardot as your marketing system. 

• Pardot Form <> Salesforce Campaign 1:1 Linkage:  A Pardot form or “Form Handler” (UI-built API connector to external forms or data inputs) is required to be linked to a Salesforce campaign.  This does create a solid reporting link between a form submission and a Salesforce campaign report in the CRM, but it also creates a situation where you have to, for each campaign you run, create a new form for every reportable campaign you are creating (unlike Marketo, which allows for Global Forms and reuse of the Form to Campaign relationship via Programs).  This need to create a new form for every campaign can have the unintended consequence of proliferating forms, which is something you will want to consider.  As in any marketing automation system, this does require that you create solid naming conventions and documentation so that the multiple forms and form/campaign relationships do not become unmanageable and overwhelming.  

Marketo considerations:

• “There are 10 ways to do {insert use case}” in Marketo:  Within the Smart List ⇒ Smart Campaign ⇒ Program operational model, you will find that there are multiple ways to do the same thing within Marketo, and when you consult the Community you will find multiple opinions about how a use case can be solved.  This is one of the unintended consequences of having a marketing automation system that is a platform that can be configured in multiple ways, and having multiple options for solving a problem can confuse less experienced users.  

My recommendation to any Marketo operator, experienced or not, is to choose a methodology (or framework) that works for your organization and how your marketers work.  There is a lot of room for creativity (and some bespoke workflow, but I would caution against too many bespoke workflows, as it can impact your ability to troubleshoot), but it is critical that you create an intuitive structure for your marketers and work within that framework as much as possible.  At a basic level, that framework should include

• • A best practice folder structure
  • Naming conventions for programs and assets 
  • A limited but comprehensive set of Best Practice Program Templates

This focus on a framework will help marketers and operators.  Seeking the assistance of experts can help you get started on this journey. 

• The API is powerful, but you need to carefully architect it:  The robustness of the Marketo API (which allows you to connect to almost any MarTech tool and internal systems) is one of the key reasons for making a decision to deploy Marketo as the core of your marketing tech stack.  However, I have seen organizations start to create connections for everything and anything without architecting how the Web Service API generated data will be understood by the system.  This can create troubleshooting headaches if you do not carefully consider how data will be received by Marketo and processed into the context of a program to capture acquisition and next step engagement.  My biggest advice here is to ensure that there is a unique data element included in any system that is inputting data into Marketo (a custom field value, a custom activity or custom object record, or a specific LaunchPoint connection to a program), and that you create, in your methodology, a process to assign every record created from the API to an acquisition program so you can track the effectiveness of your connected tools.

An additional consideration for using the power of the API is that it will require you to understand light coding (this includes taking advantage of the Form 2.0 API, which provides the functionality of the Pardot Form Handler).  Consider staffing team members (or hiring freelancers) with coding skills to enable you to take advantage of these capabilities.  Adobe does have an extensive Developer site available to assist and provide your team with code examples and the library of API endpoints that you can apply.  

• Consider best practice when using the Engagement Program Type:   The Marketo Engagement program is, in my opinion (I did say I have a bias), the most powerful and sustainable tool available for long-term prospect and customer nurture.  It is designed, with its stream/cast system, to allow marketers to use Marketo Engagement Programs as a publishing engine for consistent and relevant delivery of relevant content to audiences based on buyer journey stage, product interest, and demographic/firmographic alignment.  

However, I have seen this program (because of the ease of use of Engagement “streams”) used to execute campaigns with multiple emails involved where the marketers want to deploy a “send now, then wait 2 days, then wait 5 days, etc.” uneven scheduling of content in these programs.  The Engagement Program type is not designed for this type of campaign flow, and when marketers attempt to fit this uneven flow into the Engagement program, it creates situations where (because this is the “nurturing” program type) marketers needlessly hack the program by creating bespoke modules such as multiple streams for varied cadences, bespoke “cadence controller” workflows, and the like to attempt to create the “journey flow” in the Engagement program.  These hacks can make these programs overly complicated and hard to maintain.  

I typically guide my clients to consider a more strategic approach to nurturing and long-term engagement, which this program type excels at delivering on.  However, many organizations do want to run these response-based “nurture-ish” programs, so how do you do it well within Marketo? 

I recommend, in these scenarios, to consider using Default programs to send one-time response nurtures such as these, as Smart Campaigns with wait steps are more suitable for these types of use cases.  Additionally, with the Engagement Map now available, you can create visual workflows using a Smart Campaign that can enable you to create journeys within a default program.  

Wrapping Up:

I hope that this overview of these two systems for executing your marketing operations was helpful, and will help you when considering a technology decision, the types of skills and workarounds you will need to think through when considering joining an organization that uses one of these tools.  It is important to consider capabilities and how your team will use and gain value from the tool, and not just the pricing considerations of the vendor as you make these critical decisions.