Pardot Ratings & User Feedback
Pardot's Marketing Automation system offers marketing campaign management tools designed for small and medium size businesses. The company was acquired by ExactTarget in October, 2012 for $95.5m after which it continued to operate as a separate business unit/product line. ExactTarget was subsequently acquired by Salesforce.com in July, 2013. ExactTarget is being integrated as part of the Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud. Pardot is being incorporated into the Sales Cloud.
| Company status | Entity within public company |
|---|---|
| 2012 revenue estimate | $11m* |
| Growth 2011-2012 | 44% |
| Customers | 1,500** |
| Employees | 191*** |
Aggregate User Ratings on TrustRadius
Pardot scores close to the category average in most areas, with the exception of performance/reliability and implementation satisfaction where they don't score as well. They beat the average slightly in two categories - usability and support, but lag slightly below the average for “likelihood to recommend” and “likelihood to renew”.
| Pardot | Marketing Automation Average | |
|---|---|---|
| Likelihood to recommend | 8.2 | 8.4 |
| Likelihood to renew | 8.2 | 8.3 |
| Product usability | 8.4 | 8.3 |
| Performance and reliability | 8.2 | 8.8 |
| Support rating | 8.6 | 8.3 |
| Training satisfaction | 8.4 | 8.6 |
| Implementation satisfaction | 7.8 | 8.5 |
Summary of Review Feedback
| Strengths | Areas for Improvement |
|---|---|
| Ease of Use — Pardot is frequently praised for usability. The product is easier to use than both Eloqua and Marketo. | Email / Landing Page Editor — Editor is buggy and hard to use. However, Pardot has recently made significant improvements in this area. |
| Customer Support — Very strong endorsements of the quality of customer support. | Reporting — GoodData OEM is valuable only to highly technical users. |
| Strong integrations with 3rd party products — In addition to CRMs, integrates with many other tools including social networks. | Needs folder organizational structure — Lack of folders to store marketing assets has been an issue for some but is currently being addressed (we've heard that functionality has just been released to address this issue). |
| Salesforce integration has both plusses and minuses — Integration is obviously expected to improve now that Pardot is part of the Salesforce family, but it gets mixed reviews today. | |
Excerpts from Interview with , Co-founder, VP & GM Pardot
On market focus: “We were doing well in the SMB space and wanted to enter the enterprise market. Acquisition by ExactTarget in 2012 gave us a large company infrastructure with sales engineers, and a large geographic footprint that could help us sell into large accounts.”
On acquisition by Salesforce: “The acquisition of ExactTarget by Salesforce in 2013 is a fantastic opportunity for Pardot. For B2B marketing automation vendors, the prospect and client base is primarily Salesforce customers. We estimate that the market is currently only 5% penetrated with marketing automation solutions and we are ideally placed to capture those prospects. It is entirely logical for Pardot to be a part of the Sales Cloud and that lead scoring/lead nurturing capabilities will reside on that platform with no back and forth syncing required.”
On Salesforce.com integration: “Salesforce integration issues will obviously go away completely as we port the product to the Salesforce platform.”