A Complete Guide to B2B Marketing Analytics

Like B2C or consumer marketing, B2B marketing is termed a business practice wherein businesses market or publicize their products or services to prospective buyers. In B2B marketing, instead of targeting individual consumers like in B2C, it focuses solely on other businesses.

Salesforce B2B Marketing Analytics is an Einstein Analytics application mainly built for the B2B marketer. By Einstein Analytics application, to be specific a native Salesforce Business Intelligence (BI) and data discovery tool, which is further optimized for the usage of mobile phones that is aiming to extract, transform, and analyze the data. This is done to provide meaningful insights to everyone in the organization.

Talking B2B Marketing Analytics, it contains both Salesforce and Pardot data, populated via one’s existing Salesforce connector. It unites marketing and sales data in one place while providing customers with out-of-the-box and customizable dashboards to simultaneously view and report on metrics, share insights with teams, and further take data-driven actions to increase marketing and sales efforts.

It provides three components that uniquely suit the need to take action in reporting. These are -Datasets, Lenses, and Dashboards.

The components mentioned above, in a precise manner, build and work over each other. Datasets consist of a set of source data that is specifically formatted and optimized to have an interactive exploration. This data from the datasets can be further used to build lenses. In simpler terms, Lenses are a particular insight into any dataset’s data. After this, dashboards can be developed from these lenses. To simplify, Dashboards are a curated set of charts, metrics, and tables based on the data present in one or more lenses.

Salesforce Pardot

Salesforce Pardot is a known marketing automation solution that helps businesses create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines, and empower sales to close more such deals. It enables enterprises to track and measure their communication effectiveness while gaining more insights into user behavior and personalizing content across campaigns based on any number of specific criteria. 

You can also read here in detail about the Pardot Salesforce Integration.

Talking about Pardot B2B Marketing analytics, the present dashboards and reports here track how the perspectives interact with the business’ marketing collaterals and further visualize them through metrics like click-through rate, open rate, etc. This information additionally helps marketers create better content and improve the return on investment (ROI) of the efforts they have put into marketing. While going beyond dashboards and reports, B2B marketing analytics also helps provide predictive models and recommendations to improve the performance of one’s collaterals. These advanced features are not available in the standard offering of Analytics software, and further requirements are to be enabled as a separate module with higher costs.

Prerequisites of B2B Marketing Analytics

The prerequisites that are most essential for B2B Marketing Analytics are as follows:

• A Pardot Plus account or higher than that, accompanied by integration with a Salesforce Enterprise account or higher.
• The Salesforce instance should be enabled with the ‘connected campaigns feature’.
• A basic but proper idea of how marketing automation and marketing analytics work in Salesforce.

Setting up Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics

While setting up Pardot B2B marketing analytics, one needs to enable analytics in Salesforce and further create a B2B marketing analytics app. This is better explained through the following steps:

• To enable the analytics, move towards the Salesforce setup and search for ‘Analytics’ in the quick find box. After selecting Getting Started, click on ‘Enable Analytics’.
• Now, after the Salesforce app launcher opens, search for ‘open Analytics Studio’. 
• Click on ‘Create’, Select the Application, and then click ‘Start from Template’.
• In the options available, select ‘B2B Marketing Analytics’ and further click on ‘Continue’.
• After clicking on ‘Continue’, you will be taken to the Salesforce B2B Marketing analytics application.

The next step is to know the concepts of B2B Marketing analytics. The application is accompanied by several dashboards and datasets, which are explained in the coming sections.

If one is new to Pardot and B2B Marketing Analytics, the following steps provide the fastest way to get started:

• From ‘Marketing Setup’, select the ‘B2B Marketing Analytics’ option and then click on ‘Getting Started’.
• Expand each section to complete each task.
  • Share Pardot Data: The first thing is to hit on ‘Manage Assignments’, and then add the Integration user to the selected permission set. Further, add the sales and marketing users who should have access to B2B Marketing Analytics apps.
  • Enable Analytics: Open the Einstein Analytics Setup by clicking on it, and then turn on Einstein Analytics. If the Data Rows heading and Setup tiles appear on the screen, it shows that it is enabled.
  • Enable Data Sync and Connections: Open the Analytics Settings by clicking on it, select Enable ‘Data Sync and Connections’, and then click on ‘Save’.
• Schedule replication.
• After settings and permission sets are in place, you or your users can open Analytics Studio and create apps.
• To set up the optional datasets and dashboards, select ‘Optional Features’ in the Marketing Setup.

Also Read: Salesforce Pardot: Boost your B2B Marketing and Sales

Components of B2B Marketing Analytics

As already discussed previously, there are three components of B2B Marketing analytics. Examples of the same are discussed below:

1. Out-of-the-box Dashboards

There are five dashboards, including – Pipeline Dashboard, Engagement Dashboard, Marketing Manager, Account-Based Marketing, and Multi-touch Attribution Dashboard.

2. Out-of-the-box Lenses 

There are four standard lenses as part of B2B Marketing analytics: Pipeline Deals, Campaigns (Pardot Campaigns), Lead Sources, and Lifecycle Snapshots.

Here you can check Einstein Analytics vs. B2B Marketing Analytics.

3. Out-of-the-box Datasets 

The following datasets are currently available: Pardot Campaigns, Pardot Emails, Pardot Email Templates, Pardot Forms and Form Handlers, Pardot Landing Pages, Opportunity, Tag, Visitor, Prospect, Multi-touch Attribution (Shared App), Campaign Influence Models (Shared App), ABM Opportunities (Shared App), ABM Contacts (Shared App), and ABM Events (Shared App).

Read here to learn how Pardot AI will boost Email Engagement.

Conclusion

Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics further makes the life of a B2B marketer easier by providing directions to relevant information and the marketing collaterals’ performance. Combined with the reporting capabilities and customizations in the Salesforce Development Program, it becomes a potent and essential tool in improving one’s marketing return on investment.

On another note, if you wish to know more about Salesforce B2B marketing implementation or want to get the most out of the data by integrating various sources, Cyntexa is here to provide you with all the solutions. We are a Salesforce Development Company in the USA, UK, UAE, Australia, Singapore & India, focusing on high-quality and scalable solutions for the most complex business problems out there. We aim to provide the best Salesforce implementation, consulting, development, integration, and managed services according to the latest releases and updates in Salesforce products.