Salesforce Account Engagement fundamentals: the dashboard, the navigation and the words that trip everyone up
Most Salesforce Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) confusion isn’t technical. It comes from vocabulary: a visitor 🛈 mistaken for a prospect 🛈, an Account Engagement campaign mistaken for a Salesforce campaign, a source 🛈 mistaken for a campaign. This is a plain read-through of the product, from the screen you land on to the terms your reports depend on.
What Account Engagement actually is
Account Engagement is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation platform. Its job is to watch how people interact with your marketing (your website, your emails, your forms) and turn that behaviour into structured records the sales team can act on. Everything in the product serves one loop: attract someone, identify them, record what they did, and hand them over with context attached.
Because Account Engagement sits next to Salesforce rather than inside it, some objects exist in both places with similar names and different rules. Keeping those apart is most of the learning curve, which is why the terminology section below is the longest part of this page. Hover or tap any dashed word to see its definition without leaving the page.
Account Engagement dashboard
When you log into Account Engagement you land on the Dashboard, an overview of everything currently happening across marketing activity. It is deliberately shallow: a summary layer that points you towards the area that needs attention rather than a place you work in. Select a card to see what each part does.
Updates about new Account Engagement features and product announcements, surfaced the moment you log in. Worth scanning, because Salesforce ships changes to Account Engagement on its own release cadence and features occasionally move.
Shows scheduled emails, webinars, events and other marketing activities. Entries can be created manually with a title, start and end dates and times, a URL, an icon and a colour. That is useful for putting non-Account Engagement activity, such as a conference or a paid media burst, on the same timeline as your sends.
Example entries
- Spring product webinar12 Mar · 15:00
- Newsletter send14 Mar · 09:30
- Paid social burst18 to 22 Mar
The pulse of the database: total prospects, newly created prospects, conversions and opportunities created. Read these together rather than individually. A rising total with flat conversions usually means list imports, not marketing performance.
Example numbers
Account Engagement resolves visitor IP addresses into company names, so anonymous traffic still tells you something. It is directional intelligence, not identity: you learn that someone at a company visited, not who. Treat it as a prompt for outbound, not as a lead.
Example companies
- Northwind Logistics14 page views
- Harbor & Finch6 page views
- Alder Health Group3 page views
Search, help and settings
Prospect search
Find prospects by name or email address. You can also search by company using syntax such as at [company], which is the fastest route into an account when you only know where someone works.
Help (?)
Contextual help and how-to information. The content changes with the section you are viewing, and support cases can be logged directly from here.
Settings (⚙)
Account information, account type and time zone, sending IPs and renewal information. Time zone matters more than it looks: it governs how scheduled sends and report date ranges are interpreted.
Usage and limits
Shows how much of your account’s resources are in use. This is the screen to check regularly, because the mailable database limit is the constraint most teams hit first, and it is easy to breach through an unplanned import.
My profile
Update your name, email and job title, control which Account Engagement email notifications you receive, and grant Support access to your account when troubleshooting.
Key terminology
Five words cause most of the confusion. Learn these and the rest of the product gets easier to read.
Visitor
AnonymousSomeone Account Engagement can see through their IP address but cannot yet identify. They browse the site without submitting a form or engaging with an email, and they stay a visitor until their activity is connected to a real person.
Prospect
IdentifiedAny individual in the Account Engagement database, uniquely identified by email address. A prospect maps to a Salesforce Lead or Contact. Visitor equals anonymous; prospect equals identified. The email address is the key, so two records with the same address are the same prospect.
Account Engagement campaign
First touchThe first tracked marketing touchpoint through which Account Engagement discovered the prospect. It answers where marketing first met someone and what drove acquisition and ROI. A prospect has exactly one first-touch Account Engagement campaign, unlike Salesforce Campaigns, which allow a prospect to be a member of many.
Source
How they arrivedHow the prospect found or arrived at a particular interaction point. Campaign answers what the first touchpoint was; source answers how they got there. A single campaign can have many sources: organic search, paid social, a partner newsletter.
Conversion
Visitor to prospectThe moment a visitor becomes an identified prospect, typically by submitting an Account Engagement form for the first time. Anonymous visitor, then form plus email, then prospect. It is the clearest single measure of marketing generating new people rather than new traffic.
Visitor vs prospect, in detail
This is the distinction worth over-explaining, because nearly every reporting argument traces back to it. A visitor is a browser session tied to an IP address and a cookie. A prospect is a person tied to an email address. One is an observation; the other is a record.
The consequence is that visitor counts and prospect counts are not comparable and should never be divided into each other casually. Ten thousand visitors and two hundred prospects is not a two per cent conversion rate unless you are certain both numbers cover the same window and the same traffic. Visitors can also be duplicated across devices, while prospects deduplicate on email by design.
Turn a visitor into a prospect
Choose the pages this anonymous visitor browsed, then submit the form and watch the record change. All data here is an example.
The form on your website
The visitor has not identified themselves yet.
The biggest distinction is Visitor vs Prospect: a visitor is not yet identified, while a prospect is linked to an email address.
How tracking actually works
Account Engagement spots the visitor’s IP address, and the tracking code and cookies watch the activity. When that person later submits a form or clicks a link in an Account Engagement email, their previously anonymous browsing is stitched onto their email identity. That is why a new prospect often arrives with a history of pages they visited before you knew who they were.
Three practical implications follow.
Code on every page
Tracking code must be present on every page you care about, or the history simply doesn’t exist.
Consent can break the stitch
Cookie consent and browser restrictions can break the stitch, so some prospects will appear with no prior activity.
Clicks identify people
Email link clicks identify people just as forms do, which is why sending to a purchased list is both a deliverability and a data-quality problem.
Recap table
Tap a card to flip it, then check yourself with five quick questions.
The flow to remember
Put everything together in one path. Step through it.
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