This article describes best practices for using identity mapping alongside marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo, Salesforce, or HubSpot.
Send marketing identifiers as visitor metadata
Pendo relies on your application to provide a Visitor ID value. When a Visitor ID isn't provided in the Pendo install script and you have anonymous visitors enabled for your subscription, Pendo automatically generates an anonymous Visitor ID on your behalf. For example, when an empty string is the set value, Pendo generates an anonymous Visitor ID in the following format: _PENDO_T_ID, such as _PENDO_T_mvugjpoysuT.
To link unidentified and identified visitor data upon sign-up or sign-in, Pendo must generate the anonymous Visitor ID when the visitor is unidentified. If you use a marketing automation platform and need to send an additional anonymous marketing identifier to Pendo, pass it as agent metadata, not as a Visitor ID.
If a marketing identifier is passed to Pendo as a Visitor ID, Pendo won't be able to link unidentified usage to the identified visitor. You can also send additional fields from the marketing analytics platform as agent metadata as needed, such as additional contact information, demographic information, and marketing engagement metrics.
For guidance on sending agent metadata to Pendo through the install script, see Developer's guide to implementing Pendo using the install script and Configure visitor and account metadata.
Integrate with marketing automation platforms
Pendo has built-in integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot. Syncing visitors between Pendo and Salesforce or HubSpot requires a join key between the Pendo visitor object and the analogous object in the other system.
For most Pendo customers, this means that anonymous visitors aren't synced to Salesforce or HubSpot. However, with identity mapping, anonymous activities and metadata are merged with an identified visitor, allowing you to pass this information through the integration.
Any metadata fields that were previously missing from the identified visitor profile are updated from the anonymous visitor profile, as long as they're not enabled as historical. The First Visit metadata value is also updated to represent the earliest first visit between the two profiles. For example, if the anonymous visitor's first visit to your application was July 1, when the visitor logs in for the first time on July 15, the First Visit date for that visitor will be July 1. That updated metadata is then passed from Pendo into Salesforce or HubSpot, if configured in the integration, upon the next nightly sync.
However, identity mapping doesn't connect data to the identified visitor if the metadata is synced from Salesforce or HubSpot to Pendo. The data from the CRM is shown in Pendo exactly as it is in the CRM.
If you don’t use Salesforce or HubSpot or you use a marketing automation tool that you'd prefer to integrate directly with Pendo, you have several options to build that integration:
- Build a connection between Pendo and a third-party system using Pendo's REST API.
- Use an integration platform such as Tray.io, Workato, or Zapier to connect Pendo to a third-party system. If you do this, follow the guidelines outlined earlier to send marketing identifiers as custom metadata.
- Contract with Pendo Professional Services to have a custom integration built. To learn more, contact your Pendo account representative.