Pardot has some fancy tricks up its sleeves, and one of the most under-utilized ones are custom redirects. Pardot’s custom redirects allow you to track any link on your website or a third party site (for example, a link your Twitter page, a banner ad on a third party site, etc.).
Clicks on the link will show up as an activity on a prospect’s profile. You can also view a list of all prospects who clicked on a particular link. If you are using Google Analytics parameters, they can be integrated into the link during creation.
Let’s start with some basic ideas recommended by Pardot, then get into the more interesting ones.
Banner ads on third party sites
You may want to track a banner add explicitly and see how many prospects and visitors access it.
Social sharing
You may share a link on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and want to see how it performs
Links to files that you do not host
Your website may link to a file on a third-party site. Custom redirects can point to them and show you how many visitors access the file.
So while these are all really helpful, you can do much more with custom redirects.
3 outside the box ways to use Custom redirects
Send customers or prospects a one question survey in an email and collect the results
You could create a custom field (or fields) to capture how likely customers are to recommend you. If you had say, three options, you could create three custom redirects. Include the three links in an email, and depending on which link they click, their records would be updated with their answer. You could then use this information to target potential evangelists.
Think of how else to use this. You could customize the redirect to show them a form/survey depending on how they answer. “You hate us? Why?”.
Add a button to a thank you page to sign contacts up for your newsletter
Send a newsletter? Looking for more subscribers? You can do this in two ways – either on the form itself, or with a redirect. On your thank you page, add a paragraph and a button inviting them to subscribe to your blog with one click. On the click, redirect them to your blog subscription thank you page. In the completion actions for the custom redirect, add the contact to your newsletter list.
Use redirects to skip a form for prospects
When it comes to the funnel, the middle of it is where the action really starts to happen. A big theme in user experience is friction, or more importantly, a lack of friction. To aid this, you can use custom redirects in your emails in lieu of landing pages and forms. You still record the download using the completion actions, and your prospects don’t have to deal with a gated page to get to it. It’s a win-win!
What other nifty tricks can you think of for Pardot’s custom redirects?