B2B marketing teams using Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) often reach a critical inflection point: you’re capturing tons of data, but gaining meaningful insight from it? That’s a different story. Enter B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) – a powerful analytics extension for Pardot that transforms scattered engagement data into strategic intelligence.
In this guide, you’ll learn how B2BMA works, what it includes out of the box, and how to take full advantage of what it offers. We’ll also share practical steps for implementation, setup prerequisites, and how to unlock predictive insights with B2BMA Plus.
What Is Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics?
B2B Marketing Analytics is a specialized app within Salesforce CRM Analytics, built specifically for Pardot users. It extracts marketing data from Pardot – including email activity, form submissions, campaign results, and prospect behavior – and packages it into structured datasets. These datasets can then be explored, filtered, and visualized through dashboards, revealing patterns that standard Pardot and Salesforce reports often miss.
With B2BMA, you can finally assess cross-channel marketing impact, tie campaigns to pipeline performance, and justify ROI with out-of-the-box and custom-built dashboards.
Descriptive and Predictive Capabilities
The core B2BMA package offers descriptive analytics: what happened and where. B2BMA Plus builds on this by offering predictive capabilities using Tableau CRM’s Einstein features. This allows you to forecast trends and buyer behavior, not just analyze history.
What Kind of Data Does B2BMA Use?
B2BMA transforms raw engagement data into actionable datasets. These are automatically generated based on Pardot activity, but you can also build custom datasets using Salesforce objects or external sources via CSV/imports.
Key Pardot Datasets Included Out of the Box:
- Campaign Dataset: Includes Pardot and Salesforce campaign metadata.
- Visitor Dataset: Tracks visit count and campaign associations for each prospect.
- Prospect Dataset: Includes contact fields like job title, score, and MQL date.
- Prospect and Activity: Combines demographic data with 3 years of engagement history.
- Email Dataset: Email performance stats including delivery, opens, clicks, and opt-outs.
- Form, Form Handler, and Landing Page Dataset: Submission counts, views, and error rates.
- Opportunity Dataset: Displays financial impact of marketing activities tied to opportunities.
- Multi-Touch Attribution: Models campaign influence across first-, even-, and last-touch attribution styles.
All of this can be found with full metric descriptions in Salesforce’s official B2BMA documentation.
Key Components of Pardot B2BMA
There are four essential building blocks of any B2BMA implementation:
| Component | Description |
| Datasets | Structured data collected from Pardot and Salesforce |
| Lenses | Saved views/filters of datasets for exploring or reusing |
| Dashboards | Collections of lenses visualized together with charts/widgets |
| Apps | Containers that hold datasets, dashboards, and lenses (like folders) |
The Default B2BMA Dashboards
Salesforce provides five out-of-the-box dashboards that serve as both a foundational insight layer and templates for your customization:
1. Pipeline Dashboard
This dashboard maps the entire buyer journey from initial visitor to opportunity won. It’s particularly useful for marketing and sales alignment, highlighting how specific campaigns contribute to pipeline velocity and volume.
Metrics include:
- Visitors
- Prospects
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Open and Closed Opportunities
- Funnel velocity figures
2. Engagement Dashboard
This dashboard dives into individual asset performance – emails, forms, and landing pages – connecting interaction metrics to conversion outcomes.
Emails: Send volume, open rates, click-throughs, bounce rates, opt-outs.
Forms: Submissions, unique views, visitor/prospect conversion rates.
Landing Pages: Total and unique views, submission rate, conversion effectiveness.
3. Marketing Manager Dashboard
This combines the previous two dashboards into a marketing-centric overview, providing a high-level view of campaigns’ financial and engagement performance for fast decision-making.
4. Account-Based Marketing (optional)
For ABM strategies, this view ties together opportunity and contact data per account, offering attributed metrics like revenue, win rates, and stage progression.
5. Multi-Touch Attribution Dashboard (optional)
A must for attribution modeling, this dashboard visualizes how campaigns influence different buying stages, segmented by attribution model (First, Even, Last Touch).
What Does B2BMA Plus Offer?
B2BMA Plus takes your analytics to the next level by layering predictive modeling on top of your marketing data. It’s better suited for enterprise-level teams that need to forecast trends, behavior, or campaign success – leveraging AI insights from Einstein Analytics templates.
| Feature | B2BMA | B2BMA Plus |
| Method | Descriptive analytics | Predictive, AI-powered analytics |
| Dashboards | 5 Pardot dashboards | 3 additional predictive dashboards |
| Licensing | Built into Pardot Plus/Advanced | Requires Einstein Platform license |
| Data Modeling | Manual | Pre-built prediction templates |
Pre-Implementation Checklist
Before flipping the switch, there are several critical requirements you need to verify within your Pardot and Salesforce org:
1. Confirm Your Pardot Edition
B2BMA is only included with Pardot Plus, Advanced, and Premium editions. Legacy and lower editions like Standard and Growth don’t support B2BMA – even as a paid add-on.
2. Prerequisites Configuration
- Connected Campaigns: Ensures Pardot and Salesforce campaigns are synced.
- Campaign Influence: Allows you to tie revenue to campaigns using attribution logic.
- Permission Sets: Allocate correct access using CRM Analytics user permissions.
- Integration User: May require additional access depending on your org setup.
3. Learn the Terminology
Lenses, Dimensions, Measures, Aggregates – B2BMA comes with its own vocabulary. Spend time reviewing Salesforce’s documentation and glossary to normalize the language across your teams.
4. Understand Dataflows
B2BMA uses daily dataflows to populate dashboards. These flows not only move data but also transform it en route (i.e., formatting, filtering, combining related data).
5. Explore and Customize Starter Dashboards
The five built-in dashboards are a great starting point. Clone and rework them to suit your reporting needs. You can also embed dashboards on the Pardot Lightning app homepage to bring analytics front and center for everyday users.
6. Use Private Apps for Testing
Create a private app in Analytics Studio to build and preview dashboards without affecting live users. Once finalized, you can publish to broader user groups.
Final Thoughts
B2B Marketing Analytics unlocks strategic insight from your Pardot data – allowing you to report beyond surface-level metrics, tie marketing to revenue, and make smarter decisions about campaigns, content, and spend. Whether you stay within the standard B2BMA toolset or upgrade to predictive B2BMA Plus, it’s a vital asset for modern marketing operations.
Want support optimizing B2BMA for your sales and marketing funnel? Get in touch with ConvertPilot – our team can help you translate complex data into meaningful business decisions.