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How to track your prospect database churn in Pardot

Best Practices, Tips & Tricks Leave a comment

In Account Engagement (Pardot) the dashboard shows you how many new prospects were created on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. The visualization is easy to understand and tells a compelling story.

But… what about the other side? What about the number of prospects you are losing each day/week/month? (Note: “Losing” means they globally opt out or hard bounce).

In every org I get access to, one of the first things I do is create a Dynamic List of unmailable and/or hard bounced prospects.

The first time you run it, it will collect all prospects opted out all time. That’s to be expected and isn’t that helpful.

The value comes in when you let it run.

What you do next is this:

Select a period of time to look back: weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually.

For each time period create a filter on the list you created. Next, go into the Pardot Reports section and navigate to the Conversions report. Create a filter for the same time period.

Next, create an Excel doc (or some kind of document for recording metrics) and create two columns:

Number of Conversions | Number of Prospects Lost

I know It’s a bit manual/low-fi. But this will help you understand the rate at which you are replacing your lost prospects through conversion. If you are at less than 2 new converted prospects for every 1 lost prospect (not looking at imports/API integrations), it is something to think through.

Monitoring database churn and growth isn’t the most exciting thing, but it is something that should be monitored. It will give you insight into: email marketing campaigns, demand generation efforts, conversion optimization, prospect quality… and probably more.

Ben LaMothe
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