25 Jul How to use Pardot API to automatically grade your prospect database? (Part-2)
In our last article, we talked about Pardot Scoring and Pardot grading.
We went through some Pardot Scoring flaws and the out-of-the-box Pardot grading profile.
If you haven’t read it, take a minute to do so here.
Grading reflects a prospect’s level of match to a company’s buyer’s profile.
Here are 3 ways to grade prospects:
1. Manually grading prospects
Easiest way, but also the most time-consuming.
In Pardot, go to: Prospects > Prospect List > Navigate to the prospect record > Select the ‘Profile’ tab.
If everything went well you’ll see the following screen:
Notice the ‘Match’ column on the right – and use the blue thumbs-up / thumbs-down button to grade on each of the profile criteria.
Pardot calculates and adjusts the grade according to the profile preset.
2. Setting an automation rule to grade prospects
In Pardot, go to: Marketing > Automation > Automation Rules > Add Automation Rules
You can add a new rule based, for example, on a Prospect default or Custom field.
Let’s take the default field ‘Country’ as an example.
If our ideal customer is in Canada, tell pardot it matches the profile.
You’d use the following configuration:
Rules > Prospect default field > Country > is > Canada
then:
Actions > Change profile criteria > Default > Location > Matches
Here’s what it looks like in Pardot:
You might need to add multiple rules to get the right selection for your profile criteria.
Then, you’d need to repeat this process for any profile criteria you’d like to match/unmatch automatically.
A best practice would be to create one automation rule for each profile criteria, instead of one automation rule for all your criteria, which will be harder to maintain.
3. Using Pardot API to grade the entire database
There are companies that can take an .csv export of your Pardot database and enhance it with the business data you are looking for.
Assuming they give you back a .csv, you can avoid the hassle of calculating the grade yourself to put it in a ‘grade’ column and import back to Pardot by using Pardot API.
This is done in two steps:
1. Discover the Profile Criteria ID for each profile criteria you wish to grade.
This information is only found via an API call, and cannot be found in the UI.
Simply read a prospect’s information using the following call:
https://pi.pardot.com/api/prospect/version/4/do/read/id/59115185 HTTP/1.1
where 59115185 is a specific prospect’s id.
The response from the server should contain the following: (this corresponds to the prospect information on the first screenshot)
Notice the profile id is 864, and then each profile criteria has its own id.
For example, Company Size is 4024.
You’d need to write these down to be used in the next API call.
2. Get the .csv ready with one column for each profile criteria.
Use the profile criteria ids you discovered in the previous step as the column headers.
Then, set the values to one of the following values: ‘match’, ‘nomatch’ or ‘unknown’.
3. For each record, loop call the API to match/unmatch
You can use either e-mail or prospect’s Pardot ID to identify the prospect you’re grading.
Example: Setting a profile criteria for a prospect whose email address is bob@pardot.com to match Location:
/api/prospect/version/4/do/update/email/bob@pardot.com?profile_criteria_4028=match
Example: Setting a profile criteria for a prospect with Pardot ID 58 to nomatch the Company Size: /api/prospect/version/4/do/update/id/58?profile_criteria_4024=nomatch
If you refresh the Prospect List in Pardot, you’ll see that all the prospects are now graded!
Now that you know this, you can implement your own Profile criteria – based on the business’ top clients and grade the whole database automatically.
This should take your marketing automation and automated lead qualification to the next level!