Preparing for the Pardot Specialist Certification Exam

Even though I didn’t have any hands-on experience with Pardot, I decided to prepare and appear for this exam. Now why would I do that? Well, firstly I wanted to learn more about Pardot, a tool that I have heard so much about but never used and secondly I intended to add another certification to my arsenal. I found it to be one of the easiest exams among the nine other that I have taken so far which was made possible due to Pardot’s fantastic documentation and help material. As always, the study was guide was my basis of preparation and the exam content was almost in alignment with the topic weightage laid out in the study guide.

I never had much of a strategy or plan when studying for this exam and the idea was simple: Pick each topic from the study guide, search it on the Pardot Knowledge Base, read it, make notes and revise the notes a day before the exam. It took me almost a week to do this. From my experience, these are the most important topics to focus on when studying for this exam:

Automation tools (THE MOST important)
Forms and Landing pages
Lead Scoring
Pardot Connectors
Tracking visitor data and activity
Dynamic and Static Lists
User Roles in Pardot
Pardot Campaign reporting
Syncing and mapping between Salesforce and Pardot
Pardot Connectors (testing, activation and verification)

If you are well versed with the above topics, even in theory, you have got most of the exam covered. Understanding the following diagram and applying it when answering the exam questions was one of the most conducive tools for cracking the exam and I suggest that you do the same: