B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is a new edition of Pardot’s analytics tool. What is B2BMA Plus? What does it do? How is it different from B2B Marketing Analytics? So many questions rattling around in my head, I made it my mission to learn more about this futurist reporting platform.
Exciting news on the ground is that the release is scheduled as part of the Summer ’20 release (around July 20th), after a successful beta in Spring ’20. It was first unveiled during Dreamforce ’19, where I experienced the energy in the room first-hand during the Roadmap session, and attended the dedicated session (twice) and meet Danielle Grau (Product Manager) and members of the team that built the product.
B2B Marketing Analytics Plus – Quick Overview
B2BMA Plus is an analytics platform* for marketing data – but adds a predictive element into the mix. Analytics tells you what happened already (descriptive), whereas Einstein Analytics tells you what will happen (predictive).
In short, B2BMA Plus will crunch the numbers and tell you:
- What happened
- Why it happened
- Predictions and improvements
My guess is this will be best illustrated by a use case, which I will come to later.
*with an analytics platform, you can display your data (Salesforce/Pardot/external) in different charts and graphs, with the ability to ’slice and dice’ (filter etc.) data as you wish.
B2BMA Plus Apps
The product will include 3 marketing specific apps to start
- B2BMA,
- Marketing Campaign Insights,
- Account-Based Marketing
Note: it will not include the Sales/Service apps – those will be sold separately.
B2BMA Plus Data Sources
When creating datasets in B2B Marketing Analytics, you will have the option to create a dataset from CSV file, Salesforce Data, External Data, a Salesforce Report, or other datasets:
The big deal here is that marketers can connect directly to external data sources. See the image below for a selection of typically sources marketers use:
Important: B2BMA Plus vs. B2B Marketing Analytics
The most important thing to know is the difference between B2BMA Plus and B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA); something we are familiar with, to paint a clearer picture of what’s to come. As I just mentioned, there’s a difference between descriptive analytics vs. Predictive analytics – let’s start with this distinction and build on from there.
| B2BMA | B2BMA Plus |
|
|---|---|---|
| Nutshell | Descriptive - what happened | Predictive - what will happen |
| Availability | Generally available - released late 2018/early 2019 (Spring ‘19) | Summer ’20 release |
| Licensing | B2B Marketing Analytics permission set, which comes with Pardot Plus/Pardot Advanced editions. | Einstein Platform license. |
| What do you get? | ‘Restricted’ version of Einstein Analytics. Gives you access to B2B Marketing Analytics only - which comes with 5 dashboards out-of-the-box, plus ability to create your own using the 14+ Pardot datasets. | Gives you access to 3 marketing specific apps to start with (B2BMA, Marketing Campaign Insights, and Account-Based Marketing) |
| Predictive Data Modelling | No data modelling. | Templates will give you prediction modelling out of the box (otherwise building your own would be a very steep learning curve!). |
| Perfect Fit | Any Pardot customers. (providing they have the budget for Plus/Advanced) | Enterprise customers - it’s a beefy tool which will come on to the market at a meaty price-point. |
Use Case: Account-based Marketing
The first B2BMA Plus template developed (that will enter Beta) is Account-based Marketing (ABM). We’ve heard about ABM – a hot trend that’s continued to have the industry talking for years – because it makes sense for B2B marketing teams to reimagine their database from an account view vs. individuals.
To summarise this analytics template in three words: Improve My Pipeline. Here are three insights the demo covered, that aim to help marketers improve their pipeline.
‘Improve My Pipeline’ Story
This Einstein Discovery Story exposes relevant facts, themes, and statistical correlations in your marketing influenced pipeline. As you can see from the image below, Stories aim to explain and predict the outcomes that Einstein has surfaced to you:
- What happened
- Why it happened
- What could happen (when you switch up variables using the sidebar filters)
These graphs and explanations are all featured on individual tabs, as you can see in the images below:
The predictive data models (that come pre-built with the analytics templates) look into the datasets for underlying patterns/causes, and use these to predict future outcomes; in this way, B2BMA Plus will look into past opportunity data, look for underlying patterns/causes, and use these to predict future pipeline.
Placing Actual Pipeline head-to-head with Predicted Pipeline in the same chart clearly shows the missing potential in pipeline. This can be sliced by region, product line, or any other dimension; revealing that one product has the potential to add an exceptional amount of pipeline is an intervention marketers have the power to make with a product-specific initiative!
Number of Employees in Account
Number of Employees is a common measure for an organisation’s size, and therefore, who to target your product to. You may have defined a specific segment, for example, 6,501 to 14,800 employees. Then, you want to zoom in on what positively influences opportunities, and what factors negatively impact pipeline:
- Cases where segment did better: this may have been worsened by “Campaign Type” being blank.
- Cases where segment did worse: this may have been worsened by “Industry” being blank.
Of course, these are demo examples, but you get the idea.
Another example was explaining variation – uncovering factors that are causing whether pipeline is high, or low and the extent of that factor’s influence. For example, factor A explains a 10% variation in the measure (eg. Amount).
Campaign Example
A campaign example was shown in the Pardot Roadmap session as a static screenshot. Example insights from this campaign showed that there’s $14.5 predicted revenue, with an extra $2.7k potential pipeline by adding these prospects to the ‘Fall Promotion Campaign’.
Full Overview Video:
Summary
B2BMA Plus is an analytics platform for marketing data – but adds a predictive element into the mix. The Einstein Analytics pre-built templates and data models are well-suited for the enterprise B2B Marketer that wants to hit the ground running with predictive analytics.
Meeting the team that developed the product was one of my Dreamforce ‘19 highlights – did you know that B2BMA Plus was built within the space of a couple of months? Very impressive! I’m looking forward to hearing what’s to come.
This article was originally published on Nov 25, 2019.