Official Pardot API Documentation

Welcome! All up-to-date documentation of Pardot's official API is housed here. A few things of note:

Using the API

The Pardot API allows your application to access current data within Pardot. Through the API, several common operations can be performed on Pardot objects. Operations include:

Developers must authenticate with the API before issuing requests. Refer to the Authentication section for details about this procedure.

Some considerations must be taken while performing requests. When performing update requests, only the fields specified in the request are updated, and all others are left unchanged. If a required field is cleared during an update, the request will be declined.

The Pardot API handles a variety of requests for many of the objects available through the Pardot user interface. Most requests to the API use the following standardized format. All requests must use either HTTP GET or POST. Although GET requests are secure due to the use of SSL, we recommend using POST, with sensitive or lengthy parameter values being part of the POST message body. Developers are responsible for issuing requests with the following components:

POST: https://pi.pardot.com/api/<object>/version/3/do/<operator>/<identifier_field>/<identifier>
message body: api_key=<your_api_key>&user_key=<your_user_key>&<parameters_for_request>

GET: https://pi.pardot.com/api/<object>/version/3/do/<operator>/<identifier_field>/<identifier>?api_key=<your_api_key>&user_key=<your_user_key>&<parameters_for_request>
Parameter Required Description
object X The object type to be returned by the API request
operator X The operation to be performed on the specified object type
identifier_field X The field to be used as the identifier for the specified object
identifier X The identifier for the specified object(s)
your_api_key X The API key that was obtained during Authentication
your_user_key X The user key that was used during Authentication
format The API data format. Either xml or json (xml is default)
parameters_for_request Parameters specific to your request; See individual methods for details

The ordering of parameters is arbitrary. Parameters are passed using conventional HTML parameter syntax, with '?' indicating the start of the parameter string (for GET requests only) and '&' as the separator between parameters. With the exception of <format> and <parameters_for_request>, all components are required. Data returned from the API is formatted using JSON or XML 1.0 with UTF-8 character encoding. Keep in mind that some characters in the response may be encoded as HTML entities, requiring client-side decoding. Also, keep in mind that all parameters specified in an API request MUST be URL-encoded before they are submitted.

In general, the API will return XML or JSON containing a current version of the target object's data. However, unsuccessful requests will return a short response containing an error code and message. See Error Codes & Messages for error descriptions and suggested remedies.

Changing the API Response Format

The Pardot API supports several output formats, each of which returns different levels of detail in the XML or JSON response. Output formats are defined by specifying the output request parameter. Supported output formats include:

If the output request parameter is not defined, the output format defaults to full. See the XML Response Format sections for each object for details about the formats.

Authentication

A few prerequisites must be met to successfully authenticate a connection to the API.

  1. All requests to the Pardot API must be made via SSL encrypted connection.
  2. Authentication requests must use HTTP POST.
  3. Obtain the email, password, and user_key (available in Pardot under {your email address} > Settings in the API User Key row) for the Pardot user account that will be submitting API requests. If you need assistance in acquiring your user key, contact your Pardot support representative.

With these requirements met, an API key must be acquired. Both User and API keys are unique to individual users. API keys are valid for 60 minutes. In contrast, user keys are valid indefinitely. To authenticate, issue the following request (having replaced the values denoted by <carets> with values for your account):

POST: https://pi.pardot.com/api/login/version/3
message body: email=<email>&password=<password>&user_key=<user_key>
Parameter Required Description
email X The email address of your user account
password X The password of your user account
user_key X The 32-bit hexadecimal user key for your user account

If authentication was successful, a 32-character hexadecimal API key will be returned in the following format:

<rsp stat="ok" version="1.0">
    <api_key>5a1698a233e73d7c8ccd60d775fbc68a</api_key>
</rsp>

Otherwise, the response will contain the following:

<rsp stat="fail" version="1.0">
    <err code="15">Login failed</err>
</rsp>

Subsequent authentication requests will return either the current valid API key or a newly generated API key if the previous one had expired.

API Console

You can explore Pardot's API in the API Console. Please note that we're in the process of adding new methods.

Sample Code

Here's an example of calling the Pardot API using a simple PHP function and the cURL library.

Note: we strongly recommend against using PHP's file_get_contents function to call the Pardot API, since it makes error handling extremely cumbersome.

/**
 * Call the Pardot API and get the raw XML response back
 *
 * @param string $url the full Pardot API URL to call, e.g. "https://pi.pardot.com/api/prospect/version/3/do/query"
 * @param array $data the data to send to the API - make sure to include your api_key and user_key for authentication
 * @param string $method the HTTP method, one of "GET", "POST", "DELETE"
 * @return string the raw XML response from the Pardot API
 * @throws Exception if we were unable to contact the Pardot API or something went wrong
 */
function callPardotApi($url, $data, $method = 'GET')
{
    // build out the full url, with the query string attached.
    $queryString = http_build_query($data, null, '&');
    if (strpos($url, '?') !== false) {
        $url = $url . '&' . $queryString;
    } else {
        $url = $url . '?' . $queryString;
    }

    $curl_handle = curl_init($url);

    // wait 5 seconds to connect to the Pardot API, and 30
    // total seconds for everything to complete
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);

    // https only, please!
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS, CURLPROTO_HTTPS);

    // ALWAYS verify SSL - this should NEVER be changed. 2 = strict verify
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);

    // return the result from the server as the return value of curl_exec instead of echoing it
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    if (strcasecmp($method, 'POST') === 0) {
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    } elseif (strcasecmp($method, 'GET') !== 0) {
        // perhaps a DELETE?
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, strtoupper($method));
    }

    $pardotApiResponse = curl_exec($curl_handle);
    if ($pardotApiResponse === false) {
        // failure - a timeout or other problem. depending on how you want to handle failures,
        // you may want to modify this code. Some folks might throw an exception here. Some might
        // log the error. May you want to return a value that signifies an error. The choice is yours!

        // let's see what went wrong -- first look at curl
        $humanReadableError = curl_error($curl_handle);

        // you can also get the HTTP response code
        $httpResponseCode = curl_getinfo($curl_handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

        // make sure to close your handle before you bug out!
        curl_close($curl_handle);

        throw new Exception("Unable to successfully complete Pardot API call to $url -- curl error: \"".
                                "$humanReadableError\", HTTP response code was: $httpResponseCode");
    }

    // make sure to close your handle before you bug out!
    curl_close($curl_handle);

    return $pardotApiResponse;
}

//this will log in and print your API Key (good for 1 hour) to the console
echo callPardotApi('https://pi.pardot.com/api/login/version/3',
    array(
        'email' => 'your.email@example.com',
        'password' => 'password1234',
        'user_key' => '12345678890abcdef12345678890abcdef' //available from https://pi.pardot.com/account
    )
);

Supported API wrappers