The Complete Salesforce Analytics Guide

If you run a business made up of Salesforce solutions, having a Salesforce analytics is a great way that you can keep track on your business progress and sales results. There are so many benefits that are associated with analytics system and it’s very important for companies and small business to use this systems as a way of improving and developing their motives. A business that uses a reporting system is able to analyze it’s profits and discover areas that require more attention. Unlike other analytics systems, Salesforce analytics uses an API that helps to track all reports and records of a business. 

The Complete Salesforce Analytics Guide

The Salesforce API gives you a programmatic access of your full report that is defined in the-dashboard-builder and report builder. An API helps you to intensively integrate the-data into any mobile application or web app inside or out-side the Salesforce platform. The Salesforce analytics API-will-revolutionize the way you visualize and access your data.

With a Salesforce analytics API , you can perform the following:
  • Build customized dashboards reports.
  • Define rich-visualizations to animate-data
  • Integrate report-data into custom objects
  • Automate all reporting tasks
  • Query report-metadata

At other higher levels you can run tabular and matrix reports asynchronously or synchronously.

Once you create an analytic dashboard for displaying reports, you-can-also work with it’s resources to:
  • Refresh dashboards
  • Query dashboard-status
  • Get Dashboard Metadata and full data.
  • Get a comprehensive list of the recently used dashboards.

Requirements for Setting up Salesforce Analytics 
  • The Salesforce API is-available for-all organizations that have an API enabled. In order-to-access Salesforce reports, you must-establish-an authenticated session using the OAUth
Limits and these you can access with the report API
  • ALL historical trend-reports are-only-supported-for matrix-reports.
  • The API is limited to process reports that only contain up-to 100 fields of selected columns.
  • Your company or organization can request up-to 500 synchronous runs per hour.
  • The analytics report API can support up-to 200 requests-at-time when acquiring asynchronous reports
  • Your company can request up-to 1200 asynchronous-reports per hour.
  •  The analytic API returns the first 2000 reports row and the others are filtered.
  •  All Asynchronous-reports are available within a-24-hour rolling-period.
  • The API report system supports up-to 20 synchronous-reports to be run on a request at-a-time.

Dashboard Limits
  • Your company can request up-to 200 dashboard-refreshes per-hour
  • Your company or organization can request up-to 5,000 dashboards results per hour.
  • All-limits-that-apply to these reports also -apply-to the analytic API and dashboard limits that are create with the dashboard builder.

How to Create Salesforce Analytics Dashboards  Dashboard reports give someone a big picture of all analyzed results at a glance. You can create a dashboard report that will help you to gather sales analysis for the current quarter against the project quota. 

Steps for Creating the Dashboard Each dashboard created requires a running user who is the creator
  • Click on the dashboard-tab and you will see a list of the most used and viewed dashboards.
  • Go to “Dashboard-Lists”
  • Click on “new-dashboard”, you will be redirected to the dashboard-builder where you can drag-drop dashboard components. If you haven’t created dashboard components, you need to create them.
  • Click on dashboard-properties
  • Enter sales-manager-dashboard for the-title and accept the-auto-generated unique-name.
  • Choose my-personal-dashboard folder.
  • Click on the OK button
  • Click on save and then close the dashboard.

Create a Sales Quarter Report Before you can create any dashboard component, you need to have an underlying source report. Create a simple analytic report that will show closed sales for the current-quarter. 

Steps 1. Click on the report-tab
2. Click on create new report
3. Choose on the “Opportunities” report type and determine whether the data is available. 
4. Click on create and you will be redirected to the report-builder, drag and drop visual editor reports. The numbers of the fields will be copied to the report by default.
5. Apply the following actions on filters:
  • Select close-date for the date-field
  • Select current-FQ for range
  • Select closed-won for opportunity-status
  • Select all-opportunities for show
6. Click on tabular-format and change the report-to summary. This options allows you to easily create groupings.
7. Group the report-by “close-month” by simply dragging the fields into the grouping zones
8. Click on the menu of the account and summarize all the fields.
9. Select the sum and click on apply. This will add some amounts of groupings as-well-as the grand total.
10. click on the save button.
11. Name your report and accept to use the auto generated unique name.
12. Enter your description and choose “My-personal-custom-reports” folder.
13. Click on save and close the report.

Create a Gauge Component for Your Dashboard 1. Locate the sales-manager dashboard you created before and click on edit.
2. Drag the Gauge-icon to the first-column of the dash-board. 
3. Click on the data-sources tab and start typing the following ‘closed-sales-this-quarter’ into the tables search box.
4. Once you find a report drag it to the gauge component you created.
5. Click on the spanner icon to edit the components you have created. The breakpoints provided by default may not make so much sense, change them in the formatting tab – Choose and type good breakpoints values that will make sense for you data break-points. 6. Add a header -title and a footer by simply clicking on the components fields.
  • Enter ‘sales-for-the-current-fiscal-quarter’ for that folder
  • Enter ‘sales-vs-quota’ for the title.
  • Enter ‘closed-sales’ for the header. use headers-to-group each components on it’s own column.
7. Click on save and then close-the-dashboard

Filter Dashboards If you are creating a Salesforce analytics report for you company or organization, not all users will be interested to view the same-data-for-example, some sales representative may only want to see data that is only restricted to the industry sector that they work in. In order for your analytics report to be general you need to add some filters.

1. To add a filter just edit the dashboard you previously created.
2. In the filed area type ‘industry’ 
3. Click on the selector and choose all the categories of the industries your users might-be interested in. 
4. Click OK and save your dashboard.

Once you have done the above procedures and steps, you will be left with a meaningful Salesforce analytics data that will help you to monitor the analysis of your company or business sales. Salesforce analytics are used by many companies to determine their business progress and keep track records of all the progress being made. With a good Salesforce analysis, a company or business can be able to keep track of the profits and losses incurred during a particular period. Related dashboards information is available on how to create a dashboard in salesforce page.
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Amanda is the Lead Author & Editor of Rainforce Blog. Amanda established the Rainforce blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to Salesforce usage.