Visualize Live Salesforce Marketing Data in Power BI (via CData Connect AI)

Power BI transforms your company's data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get access to Salesforce Marketing data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to use CData Connect to create a live connection to Salesforce Marketing, connect to Salesforce Marketing data from Power BI and then create reports on Salesforce Marketing data in Power BI.

Configure Salesforce Marketing Connectivity for Power BI

Connectivity to Salesforce Marketing from Power BI is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Salesforce Marketing data from Power BI, we start by creating and configuring a Salesforce Marketing connection.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
👁 Adding a Connection

2. Select "Salesforce Marketing" from the Add Connection panel
👁 Selecting a data source

3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Salesforce Marketing.

   Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

   Set the and to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

   Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

   By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

   The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set .

   👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
   
4. Click Save & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Salesforce Marketing Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions
   

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Salesforce Marketing data from Power BI.

Query Salesforce Marketing Tables

Follow the steps below to build a query to pull Salesforce Marketing data into the report:

1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data -> Online Services -> CData Connect AI and click "Connect"
2. Click "Sign in" and authenticate with your CData Connect AI account 👁 Authenticating with Connect AI
   
3. After signing in, click "Connect" 👁 Connecting to Connect AI
   
4. Select tables in the Navigator dialog 👁 The available tables. (Salesforce tables are shown)
   
5. Click Load to establish the connection to your Salesforce Marketing data from Power BI

Create Salesforce Marketing Data Visualizations

After connecting to the data into Power BI, you can create data visualizations in the Report view by dragging fields from the Fields pane onto the canvas. Select the dimensions and measures you wish to visualize along with the chart type.

Click Refresh to synchronize your report with any changes to the data.

Live Access to Salesforce Marketing Data from Data Applications

With CData Connect AI you have a direct connection to Salesforce Marketing data from Power BI. You can import more data, create new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating Salesforce Marketing data.

To get SQL data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources (including Salesforce Marketing) directly from your on-premise BI, reporting, ETL and other data applications, visit the CData Connect AI page and start a free trial.