Using Salesforce Wave to measure your B2B marketing effectiveness

Marketing ROI is a question that always comes up, whenever I do Pardot implementations. How do we measure engagement? How do we measure marketing generated pipeline? We all know that marketing budget is closely tied to how much business can be generated for the effort, but this is not always easy to measure.

Pardot does come with some out of the box reports that allow you to see engagement with a single landing page or email. However, if you want to start comparing engagement across campaigns or measure marketing influence on opportunities based on marketing assets, you are soon challenged. When addressing these challenges you have two options: use Salesforce reporting or GoodData.

Salesforce reporting is flexible but it depends on data being stored in Salesforce which is not the case for prospect activities or engagements with marketing assets. The strongest use case is around pipeline reporting and marketing’s influence on it.

GoodData, on the other hand, allows you to drill down further into engagement and activities, but it doesn’t allow you to combine your Pardot data with data from other sources.

In October, Salesforce extended their portfolio of products and introduced “Wave for B2B Marketing”. This product allows Pardot users greater and more flexible insight into their Pardot marketing efforts by utilising the capabilities of Salesforce Wave Analytics. Wave for B2B marketing offers you the following features:

The Marketing Manager dashboard

This provides you with an overview of your marketing pipeline and engagement relating to your marketing assets.

The Engagement dashboard

This dashboard takes a deep dive into how your emails, forms, and landing pages are performing based on different metrics (submission rate, click rate and so on), so you can quickly get an idea of which campaigns are driving good engagement.

The Pipeline dashboard

This dashboard provides deep insight into your marketing pipeline, opportunity lifetime, as well as which campaigns and lead sources, are driving the most business.

Seven datasets

All these dashboards are based on seven datasets that are available for you to use in any way you wish, diving into Pardot visitors, campaigns, forms, landing pages, opportunities, as well as email and tag data.

You can use the above dashboards to effectively analyse your Pardot data, however by using the data sets you are also able to build your own custom dashboards. New dashboards can be created and completely customised according to information that is key for your business. You can leverage Pardot data and Salesforce data, including any other third party data that you choose to import into Wave. This gives you incredible flexibility when compiling reports. Imagine creating powerful dashboards that give you detailed insight into Pardot and Salesforce, but also advertising, Google Analytics or any other data you might be gathering. Utilising a tool like Wave might be exactly what you need to get an overview of which marketing efforts are key in driving brand awareness and pipeline for your business.

Written by

Rikke Hovgaard

I have worked with CRM Analytics since 2015 (back then Wave). I started this blog to help make the journey to master CRM Analytics easy by documenting tips, tricks & cool solutions.

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