Concept
You know a lot about your prospects. You know their titles, their geography, their activity level (score), and a lot more. Why show the same website content to everyone? Now you can set up dynamic content and change call-outs, messages, or other areas of your website based on prospect fields.
Dynamic Content Instructions>>
Example
Pardot sells to several different types of buyers. A common way for us to segment is based on what CRM system a prospect uses. You can imagine that if a prospect is using NetSuite and we show messaging around salesforce.com, it does not resonate well. Instead, wherever possible, we should switch out the name of the CRM vendor based the prospect and show the most compelling message possible.
Now see how this dynamic content segment might be displayed on our homepage.
If the prospect is using salesforce.com, we’d display:
If we know they are using SugarCRM, we’d show:
If we do not yet know what CRM they are using or if they are using one that does not match any of our dynamic content rules, we would show a default message:
FAQ
I already use Google Website Optimizer (or Optimizely), why is this better/different?
Google Website Optimizer (recently folded into Google Analytics) and tools like Optimizely are terrific for multi-variate testing. They are, however, quite different from this solution. Pardot’s Dynamic content is about using what you know about prospects rather than running experiments and choosing winners. Where you may use a tool like Google Website Optimizer to select the best color for a button or link, you’d use Pardot Dynamic Content to show content relevant to a certain audience (i.e. imagine showing customer messaging to people you KNOW are clients of yours as opposed to the usual call to action).
Is this hard to implement?
The implementation is actually very similar to the tools mentioned above (why mess with a good thing?). After you create your content and rules, Pardot will give you a javascript snippet to insert on your site. Simply place it wherever you would like the content to appear, much as you would with a Pardot form.
What if more than one rule matches a prospect?
Dynamic Content will be displayed based on the first rule matching the prospect.
What about visitors? They wouldn’t have field information yet.
Dynamic Content is only shown to prospects (not visitors). Visitors will see the default content.
Future Enhancements
- Make a widget to easily add this to Pardot landing pages.
- Make these available in emails.
This is an awesome feature! It will make landing pages really powerful, allowing you to target each visitor differently. Kudos to the team who implemented it.
Truly amazing new feature. We will be implementing it into our site design very soon.
Looks cool. Any comment on how using dynamic content this might affect organic search results and SEO overall for the affected pages?
Hey Colin,
Google’s bots can render most JavaScript, so your default content is what will likely get crawled.
In consideration of users with JavaScript disabled, you can add a `noscript` tag and include your default content (sample code snippet).
Let me know if you have any further questions!