What is the difference between a Visitor and a Prospect in Pardot?

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The concept of Pardot prospect and visitor always take a little explaining for new Pardot users, especially if they’ve never dealt with a marketing automation tool before.

What is a visitor?

In Pardot, visitors are anonymous people who visit your website. As they browse your site, Pardot tracks their interactions and activities using cookies. Basically, anyone who visits your website, but hasn’t provided their email address.

If you’ve correctly placed the tracking code on your website, you can view all visitors by navigating to Prospects > Visitors in the menu bar. If you’re not in Lightning, the page should look similar to this:

What is a prospect?

A prospect is Pardot’s name for a site visitor who has given you their email address. Cookies stored on a visitor’s record are appended to the new prospect record. Meaning, even all activity someone conducted as a visitor will be stored on the newly created prospect.

Prospects can be viewed by navigating to Prospects > Prospect List in the menu bar, or by selecting the Prospects tab in Lighting. The Lightning page should look similar to this:

Are you Lightning Ready? Pardot Lightning App Setup and Configuration

How are prospects created in Pardot?

There are a few different ways, but the most common method is for a visitor to fill out a form that contains their email address.

Relevant Documentation