Whenever I support my customers with Pardot clean-up tasks, I am always scared to look at the custom redirect page. Way too often I see thousands of custom redirects, sometimes going back 5 years. I’m here to make you question the need for creating tracked links before you end up like them.
In case you are not sure what a custom redirect is, take a look at Jeena’s blog post, then head back here.
From what I have seen, marketers create custom redirects every time they want to track a link. That could be to see which promotional campaign resulted in the most registrations, or even to track link clicks in sent emails.
But sometimes people forget that Pardot is able to track most of those clicks without using individual custom redirects.
What is a good reason to create a custom redirect?
As a general rule, I’d say anytime when simple Pardot tracking is not sufficient for your purpose. See a few examples below:
- Promoting a Pardot landing page on third-party platforms
- When you expect specific actions after click – like creating a Salesforce task as soon as someone clicks on a specific link
- Tracking an externally stored file access in an email send
- Paid campaigns where Pardot visibility is essential for ROI reporting
- Redirecting a Pardot link to another link
Another common reason for using custom redirects is to collect UTM parameters. This is amazing news for your Analytics team, as they can see all those click activities with the ability to track it back to specific mediums and sources.
However, that on its own doesn’t mean you need a custom redirect. You could just build a UTM-tracked link via online tools (e.g. Campaign URL Builder) or your company-specific guidelines.
And with that, you could easily control the number of custom redirects in your Pardot account. No more hours of searching if those links are active or checking if anyone is using a 3-year-old custom redirect somewhere. If you follow these guidelines, your Pardot will only include custom redirects with a purpose.
Now take a look at your Pardot account. How many custom redirects do you have? Can you say confidently that you know their own dedicated purpose and they are in fact all active?
If your answer is yes, I am really happy for you – you are one step closer to a clean Pardot org. But if you see a long list of legacy or unidentifiable custom redirects, then enforce an internal policy and start cleaning.
At Nebula, we offer Pardot health audits to highlight issues like this one, because everyone deserves a well-functioning, healthy Pardot account.
