B2B Marketing Analytics in Salesforce: What It Is and How to Set It Up

Marketing teams sitting on Salesforce data often ask the same question: why does the pipeline dashboard tell one story and the marketing report tell another? B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) exists to close that gap. It takes data from Salesforce Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) and Salesforce CRM and turns it into a single, visual picture of how marketing activity connects to revenue.

Salesforce’s own research backs the need for this. In its State of Marketing survey of over 8,200 marketing leaders worldwide, 78% said their customer engagement decisions are data-driven, yet fewer than half reported having a fully unified view of that data. B2BMA was built to solve exactly that disconnect for B2B teams running on Salesforce.

This guide covers what B2B Marketing Analytics is, how it has evolved, what it costs to license, and how to set it up, using Salesforce’s current naming and editions as of 2026.

What Is B2B Marketing Analytics?

B2B Marketing Analytics is a CRM Analytics app purpose-built for B2B marketers on the Salesforce platform. It connects to your existing Salesforce-Account Engagement integration, pulls in campaign, email, and visitor data, and packages it into datasets that power dashboards and lenses. The result is analysis that goes beyond what standard Account Engagement or Salesforce reports can show, including multi-touch attribution, pipeline influence, and account-level engagement.

A quick naming note, since this trips people up during searches and setup: Salesforce renamed Pardot to Salesforce Account Engagement in 2022, and it now lives under the Marketing Cloud Engagement umbrella. Around the same time, Tableau CRM was renamed CRM Analytics, which is the platform B2BMA is built on. The product functions the same way; only the labels changed. If you’re working from older documentation or vendor materials that still say “Pardot” or “Tableau CRM,” you’re reading about the same tool under its current name.

How B2BMA Connects to Salesforce Account Engagement

B2BMA doesn’t collect new data on its own. It relies on your Salesforce-Account Engagement connector to pull existing prospect, campaign, and engagement records into CRM Analytics through scheduled dataflows, alongside Opportunity and pipeline data from Sales Cloud. That data sync is what keeps dashboards current, so the accuracy of your reporting depends heavily on how well that connector and your underlying Data Cloud architecture are configured. Teams that skip this groundwork tend to end up with dashboards that look complete but are quietly out of date.

Key Components of B2B Marketing Analytics

B2BMA is built from a handful of core building blocks that stack on top of each other:

Datasets are the raw material. Salesforce ships core datasets out of the box, such as Prospect and Activity, which combines prospect demographics with three years of engagement history. Admins can also build custom datasets from CSV files or outside sources.

Lenses are focused views into a dataset. B2BMA comes with four standard lenses: Pipeline Deals, Campaigns, Lead Sources, and Lifecycle Snapshot. Each one lets you explore a specific slice of the data without building a report from scratch.

Dashboards combine multiple lenses into a single view for a specific audience or purpose. This is where most marketers spend their time day-to-day.

Metrics, dimensions, and filters sit underneath all three, letting you narrow a dashboard down to, say, converted leads in a single industry over the last quarter.

The Five Standard B2BMA Dashboards

Out of the box, B2BMA ships with five pre-built dashboards, each aimed at a different stakeholder:

1. Marketing Manager Dashboard – a combined view of pipeline and engagement data for a quick health check on overall performance.
2. Pipeline Dashboard – tracks opportunities by stage and shows how marketing activity is moving deals forward.
3. Engagement Dashboard – covers email opens, clicks, and website visits at the contact level.
4. Multi-Touch Attribution Dashboard – applies multiple attribution models to show which campaigns and touchpoints are actually driving revenue, not just the last click before close. Once a deal moves past marketing influence into quoting and contracting, that same pipeline value flows into Revenue Cloud, which is where most teams reconcile marketing-sourced pipeline against closed revenue.
5. Account-Based Marketing Dashboard – rolls engagement and pipeline data up to the account level, built for teams running ABM programs.

Beyond these five, you can build custom dashboards with your own filters and widgets, which is usually where the real value shows up once a team has a few months of clean data behind them.

B2B Marketing Analytics vs. B2B Marketing Analytics Plus

Standard B2BMA covers reporting and historical analysis. B2B Marketing Analytics Plus adds predictive capability through Einstein Discovery and includes two purpose-built apps:

• Marketing Campaign Intelligence, which analyzes engagement and campaign data to surface what’s actually improving ROI, and lets teams build Einstein Discovery stories around it.
• Account-Based Marketing, which focuses on account-level engagement and revenue potential rather than individual leads.

B2BMA Plus needs Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Account Engagement, and Einstein Discovery to function, so it’s a bigger commitment than the standard app. If your team is exploring where AI-driven prediction fits into your marketing stack more broadly, it’s worth looking at how Agentforce is extending that same predictive layer across sales and service, not just marketing.

What Salesforce Edition Do You Need?

This is where a lot of teams get stuck before they even start. B2BMA requires:

• Account Engagement Plus, Advanced, or Premium edition (Growth edition does not include it)
• Salesforce Enterprise Edition or higher

Before doing anything else, check your current edition and permission-set licenses under Setup > Company Settings > Company Information. If you’re on Growth edition or a lower Salesforce tier, you’ll need to upgrade before B2BMA setup will even be an option in your org.

How to Set Up B2B Marketing Analytics

The setup sequence is straightforward once permissions are confirmed, but the order matters:

1. Confirm licensing. Verify your Account Engagement and Salesforce editions support B2BMA, and check that permission-set licenses are active.
2. Enable CRM Analytics. From Marketing Setup, go to B2B Marketing Analytics > Getting Started and follow the setup wizard to enable CRM Analytics and share your marketing data.
3. Turn on data sync. In CRM Analytics settings, enable data sync and connections, then schedule replication so Account Engagement data stays current in Salesforce.
4. Create the B2BMA app. Open Analytics Studio from the App Switcher and create a new app using the B2B Marketing Analytics template.
5. Assign permissions. Add your integration user and any sales or marketing users who need access under Manage Assignments.
6. Configure datasets and lenses, then build your dashboards and reports in CRM Analytics Studio.

A common snag: if app creation throws an “application error,” it’s almost always because one of the optional features under B2B Marketing Analytics > Optional Features hasn’t been completed. Check that section before troubleshooting anything else.

Salesforce updates this workflow periodically, so treat the above as a reliable starting map, and confirm current screens against Salesforce’s official Trailhead module before you begin. Org-specific quirks (custom objects, existing automation, data volume) are common enough that a lot of teams bring in a Salesforce implementation partner for the initial setup rather than troubleshooting the wizard alone, and lean on Salesforce managed services afterward to keep dashboards and dataflows running as the underlying data model changes.

Why B2B Marketing Analytics Is Worth the Setup Effort

It shows which channels actually influence pipeline, not just which ones generate the most raw leads. Tracking conversions and sales outcomes side by side with campaign data exposes which channels deserve more budget and which ones are underperforming despite decent lead volume. This is the same pipeline-visibility problem we covered in our piece on using Agentforce to turn Slack into a RevOps assistant, B2BMA solves it on the reporting side, while that setup solves it on the action side.

It improves marketing ROI decisions. Once you can see cost against pipeline influence by channel, budget reallocation stops being a guess.

It supports better lead and account prioritization. Lifecycle and engagement data help marketing and sales agree on which prospects are actually sales-ready, instead of relying on lead volume alone.

It gives marketing and sales a shared source of truth. Because B2BMA pulls from both Account Engagement and Salesforce CRM data, both teams are looking at the same pipeline numbers instead of reconciling two different reports.

Cloud Odyssey’s Take

Most of the B2BMA implementations we’ve seen struggle for the same reason: teams treat it as a reporting layer to switch on, when it’s really a data quality exercise first. If your Account Engagement-to-Salesforce sync has gaps, duplicate records, or inconsistent campaign naming, B2BMA will surface those problems louder and faster than your old reports ever did. It’s a feature, not a bug, but it means the setup checklist above is only half the job. We’ve written more on this in the context of data governance across the Salesforce platform, and the same principle applies here: clean data upstream is what makes any analytics layer trustworthy downstream.

The other half is deciding what “marketing-influenced pipeline” actually means for your business before you configure a single dashboard. Teams that skip this step end up with technically correct dashboards that nobody trusts, because the attribution model doesn’t match how the sales team actually thinks about deals. Get that definition aligned across marketing and sales first, then build the dashboards around it.

If you’re evaluating whether your current Account Engagement and Salesforce setup can support B2BMA, or want a second look at whether your existing configuration is capturing clean data, a Salesforce CRM health check is usually the faster way to find out than guessing your way through the setup wizard.

Frequently Asked Questions