Get to Know Your CRM Analytics Home

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Navigate the desktop interface.
Describe the different CRM Analytics assets like app, dashboard, lens, and dataset.
Describe the different ways to import data into CRM Analytics.
Create an app.
Customize your CRM Analytics home page.
Organize an CRM Analytics presentation.

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series.

Open CRM Analytics

Now that you’ve got your special CRM Analytics-enabled Developer Edition org, go ahead and open CRM Analytics. From the App Launcher ( App Launcher icon ), find and select Analytics Studio.

If Analytics Studio doesn’t open, check to see if your pop-up blocker is on. If so, change the setting to allow pop-ups from your org.

The first time you open Analytics Studio, the Welcome screen appears, offering resources to help you get started. You can dismiss it now, and open it again anytime from the Help menu. Click the question mark at upper right to open the menu. Then select Welcome to CRM Analytics.

Get Familiar with Your CRM Analytics Home

CRM Analytics opens to the Home page, your launchpad where you can find and view all your analytics assets. Along with CRM Analytics assets, such as apps, dashboards, lenses, and datasets, you also access Lightning reports and dashboards and Einstein Discovery models here.

The home page is designed to help you return to previously viewed assets and discover new ones. As soon as you start using CRM Analytics, your recents, favorites, and other relevant assets are surfaced on the home page for easy access. Soon your home page will look something like this screenshot.

Analytics Studio Home screen populated with recommendations

The “For You” panel dynamically shows your most relevant assets and can include the following cards.

Recently Updated shows new and recently modified items. You won’t be left out on changes to your favorite dashboard or miss new ones of interest.
Created By Me lists the last three items that you created, and includes a handy View All button to open a list of all your creations.
Jump Back In helps you quickly get back to the dashboards you and your colleagues frequently view.
Discover New Items recommends assets that you haven’t viewed before. The recommendations are based on item popularity among colleagues.

The “My Analytics” panel lists the assets you viewed recently or favorited.

Browse CRM Analytics Assets

Take a moment to click Browse and check out the possibilities for searching CRM Analytics assets.

Analytics Studio with Browse selected in the left navigation panel

In addition to the field for entering search text, you can filter by asset and by attributes such who created an asset.

But what are these assets? Let’s take a few minutes to discuss the CRM Analytics assets.

App--A purpose-built set of analyses and answers about a specific area of your business. With apps, you can provide curated paths through your data, plus powerful tools for spontaneous, deep explorations. After creating dashboards, lenses, and datasets, you can organize them in apps to present assets in relevant order, and then share apps with appropriate people and groups.

My DTC Sales This is a sample app we’ve provided—just in the Developer Edition org—to help you get started with CRM Analytics. You’ll work with this app later in the trail.
You can create additional apps and control access to each of them. If colleagues have access to an app, they can see all the datasets, lenses, and dashboards within that app. For example, you might want to create different apps for different teams, based on their needs. Creating an app for each team allows you to provide a customized experience for every department. At the same time, you can still protect sensitive data through row-level security on datasets, which you can learn about in the Analytics Security Implementation Guide.
My Private App This app is visible to you and only you. You can’t share My Private App with anyone. It’s a good place to store assets with sensitive data or work-in-progress dashboards that you aren’t ready to show others.

Dashboard--A curated set of charts, metrics, and tables that gives you an interactive view of your business data. Wait until you see what these things can do. Wow!

Lens--A saved exploration. You’ll go more in depth about lenses later in the trail when you do your first explorations.

Dataset--A set of specially formatted source data, optimized for interactive exploration.

To prepare for further CRM Analytics exploration, let’s talk data!

Understand Importing Data and CRM Analytics Datasets

CRM Analytics provides multiple ways to import data, both from Salesforce and external sources, including recipes, dataflows, trending Salesforce report data, uploading from external files such as .csv files, and connecting to external data sources. For more information about integrating data, see Integrate and Prepare Data for Analysis.

You can also work with data that's not loaded into CRM Analytics. Direct Data options let you analyze and explore your data as it resides in places like Salesforce objects, Data Cloud, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery. You can run queries on the data in real time and also build dashboard widgets based on the queries you run. For more information, see Gain Insights on Data Directly at Source.

The main thing to understand is that from data, you build lenses, dashboards, and apps. You don’t have to do any importing or connecting now, however, because we’ve done that for you. Let’s move right to the next task—creating an app.

Create Your First CRM Analytics App

Apps allow users to organize and control sharing of their datasets, lenses, and dashboards.

You’d like to create some lenses to share with only your group. You don’t want to save them in the Shared App because they’ll be visible to all CRM Analytics users in your org. To share assets with a select set of users, let’s create a new app for them.

In CRM Analytics, click the Create button at the upper right and then select App.
Click Create Blank App and then click Continue.
Enter My Exploration as the name of your app.
Click Create. You created an app, and it displays in a new tab!
Let’s add a description so that your colleagues understand the app’s purpose and contents. Click the menu and select Details.
In the Description field, type Let's save our DTC data explorations here.
Click Save.

Awesome work, you created your first app! Later in the trail, you’ll create explorations to share from this app. But first, there’s more to learn about the CRM Analytics home page and apps.

Customize Your CRM Analytics Home Page

Now that you’ve created your first CRM Analytics app, you’re ready to customize your own CRM Analytics home page.

Start by clicking the Analytics Studio tab. On the left, you see filters and customizable views.
Click Browse, and then click the Apps tab to view all apps.
Locate My Exploration and click the row level action menu.
Select Favorite.
In a similar fashion, favorite the My DTC Sales app.
Now click Favorites in the left panel to see your new list!

Assets appear on your CRM Analytics home page in the order that you favorited them.

The CRM Analytics home page also has other areas that you can customize.

Notifications are alerts that CRM Analytics can send you when a goal or measure is reached, exceeded, or falls below your mark. You can set up notifications to track the progress of your goals right on your home page. You can learn more about notifications in Personalize Your Analytics in the next module.
Watchlists enable you to get stock-ticker style tracking for your dashboard metrics. Use watchlists to take a snapshot of your top metrics from any dashboard and monitor them from the home page. To learn more about watchlists, check out CRM Analytics Watchlist: Quick Look.
Collections are like playlists for your data, enabling you to curate, manage, and share items, even if they’re spread across multiple apps. To learn more collections, check out Curate and Share Insights with Collections.

Run Presentations from CRM Analytics Apps

CRM Analytics apps are where you run your dashboards and lenses.

If you’re not already there, click Favorites on your CRM Analytics home page.
Click My DTC Sales. This opens the browse page of the app where you can see the app’s assets. (On the CRM Analytics home page, you can browse all of your assets, but when browsing an app, you’re viewing only the assets in that app.)
Click the Run App button. (If the app doesn't load on your first attempt, close the tab and log in again with this link: login.salesforce.com.)
The app opens to the first dashboard in its navigation list. Notice that the upper part of the dashboard has controls for running the dashboard and the app, including a dropdown menu with additional options.
While running a dashboard in Analytics Studio, you can:

Edit the dashboard in the dashboard designer
Share from the dashboard
Full-screen the presentation
Open the notification panel and create notifications on dashboard widgets
Open the annotation panel and annotate dashboard widgets (if the Annotations feature is set up)
Add a dashboard to a collection
Clone the dashboard in a new tab
Ask natural language questions about dashboard data (if Conversational Exploration is set up)
Save modified views of the dashboard
Return the dashboard to its initial view
Navigate to other dashboards and lenses in the app
In addition, if you have manager access to the dashboard, you can:

Save the dashboard
Delete the dashboard
Print or save a PDF file of the dashboard
Use the Dashboard Inspector tools to assess performance

There are a lot of things you can do while running a dashboard! We’ll cover most of these as we progress through the trail. First, let’s learn how to navigate through the assets in the app and set up a presentation.

Click the down arrow next to the dashboard title to open the navigation list.
The list has the dashboards and lenses in the app that are available for presenting. Simply click a dashboard name to run the dashboard in your presentation. Because the DTC admin set you up to be a manager of this app, you have access to the controls for setting up presentations.
Click Edit List to arrange your presentation. The Selected Assets column shows the order of your presentation. You can rearrange the order, or move assets to the Available Assets column so they don’t appear in the navigation list.
Click Opportunity Details, and then click the left arrow. If you saved the app at this point, you could then share it with an individual or group that shouldn’t see opportunity details. You’d give them Viewer access to the app. For other colleagues, you could give Editor or Manager access, depending upon the amount of control you wanted them to have. For more information about sharing apps, see App-Level Sharing.
Click Regional Sales, and then click the up arrow so that it becomes first in the list. Feel free to practice rearranging the navigation list. But just take a minute, because you need to move to the next module to learn more about CRM Analytics dashboards before the meeting with your manager!
When you’re ready, set the navigation back the way it was by clicking Cancel.

Ready to Discover CRM Analytics

Pat yourself on the back! In this module, you signed up for your CRM Analytics-enabled Developer Edition org and got to know the CRM Analytics environment. You created your own shareable app, set up your home page, and learned about app presentations. You did great!

But you’re just on the verge of learning the power of CRM Analytics. In the upcoming modules, you’ll navigate the dashboards in the sample app and then jump into real data exploration on desktop and mobile.

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