How to Create Custom Engagement Minute Counts

What you’ll learn

This playbook provides a step-by-step guide to using Demandbase One Marketing (DB1M) to create custom Engagement Minute Counts for Product Engagement. It walks you through classifying all types of marketing activities by product, allowing you to generate a tailored Product Engagement Minute Count. By the end, you’ll equip your go-to-market team with a simple way to identify which product(s) a Person or Account is interested in at any given time.

Why is this important?

People in organizations that sell multiple products often struggle to determine which product(s) an Account or Person is interested in. Traditionally, this requires manually reviewing an Account or Person’s activity across different Marketing Programs—a tedious process that may miss key signals.

What if you could instantly show how interested an Account or Person is in each of your products?

Demandbase lets you customize how Engagement Minutes are assigned to marketing activities like web visits, program responses, and intent signals—tying them directly to specific products. These insights can then be added to your CRM as custom fields on Account, Contact, and Lead records

This approach can also be used to score Marketing Campaigns, Themes, or Pain Points, giving your go-to-market teams instant access to valuable insights that drive smarter, more efficient engagement.

What you need to get started

Before diving in, you need to decide which marketing activities to associate with a product. This approach is most effective when using Marketing Program Responses, Web Visits, and Intent Signals. Start by identifying how you currently track each of these.

Marketing Program Tracking

Tracking Marketing Programs in Demandbase will vary depending on the current Marketing Automation and CRM integrations you have set up, below we will cover the most common setups.

Marketo Programs

You have two options when using Marketo Programs:

1. Implement or use an existing program naming convention to identify this program relates to Product A.
2. Manually select all the programs which relate to Product A. This method is less scalable and will require manual effort whenever new programs are created

Salesforce Campaigns

You have three options when using Salesforce Campaigns:

1. Build custom field on the SFDC Campaign which identifies which product the campaign is focused on. DB1M can not read custom Campaign level fields so you will also need to create a custom Campaign Member field which pulls in this custom campaign field value.
2. Implement or use an existing campaign naming convention to identify this program relates to Product A.
3. Manually select programs which relate to Product A. This method is less scalable and will require manual effort whenever new programs are created

Microsoft Dynamics Campaigns

You have two options when using Microsoft Dynamics Campaigns:

1. Implement or use an existing campaign naming convention to identify this program relates to Product A.
2. Manually select programs which relate to Product A. This method is less scalable and will require manual effort whenever new programs are created

Web Visits

Web Visit mapping is relatively simple, but first you need to ensure your Marketing Automation Platform is integrated to Demandbase One Marketing (DB1M). If you do not have your MAP integrated, this process will still work, however it will only track anonymous web visits, assuming you have placed the Demandbase Script on your website.

There are two methods to identify web visits associated with a product.

• Full URLs
  Identify the exact URLs that relate to a specific product such as: www.demandbase.com/products/orchestration

• URL Branches
  Identify the URL branches which relate to a specific product such as: /products/orchestration

As an example, you can see how Demandbase has identified certain URL branches which relate to the DB1M product:

• /products/account-based-foundation
• /products/predictive-analytics
• /products/orchestration
• /products/account-based-analytics

Pro tip: When reviewing web pages specific to product, speak with not only your Digital and Web Teams, but also align with your Sales and Customer Success organization around the list of pages you have curated. You want to ensure every GTM Team is in agreement on how you are associating pages to products, especially since this data will ultimately produce the custom Engagement Minutes Counts that they will be utilizing.

Intent Signals

For Demandbase Intent signals you have two options, depending on how you have set up your Keyword Sets.

1. If you have built your Keyword Sets to be product-focused, no other alterations are needed.
2. If your Keyword Sets are not product-specific, you have two options; you can either create new Product Specific Keyword Sets, or you can list all your tracked keywords by product in an external document (you will need this list later).

If you have integrated third party intent solutions, you will need to identify which signals from those providers should be related to your products.

Step-by-step playbook

Part 1: Create an Activity Segment

1. Now that you have identified your relevant Marketing Activities, you can navigate to DemandbaseOne Marketing > Database > Segments and create a new Activity Segment to classify these activities by product.

   Reminder: Segments will review all records of the object type, in this example that would be Activities, and exclusively classify them into a segment group. This means an activity can not be related to two products.



2. Build segment groups for each product you wish to track activities around.
   In this example, we will use four segment groups, DB1M, DB1S, Advertising, and Data. If an activity does not meet the criteria of a Segment Group, it will be classified into the Other Groups section. Ensure the naming convention in the Other Groups section is clear to indicate these remaining activities are not part of the listed segment groups.



3. Now we will set up criteria for the DB1M segment group. You can see below how we have utilized the different Marketing Activities we identified.

Member of SFDC Campaign

• In the above example, we followed the process of creating a Campaign and Campaign Member field in SFDC to utilize here named Related Product. This field is populated by our MOPs team when they build the campaigns in SFDC.
• Note that in this example we have set the Campaign and Campaign Type constraints to Exist. This is because we know no SFDC Campaign will have a value in the Related Product field unless it should.
• Lastly, we are not adding in constraints for Campaign Member Status or Responded Status because our goal is to capture all activity regardless of status.

Visited Web Page

• You will see in this example that we are using Contains logic within the Visited Web Page activity card, which means we are adding in URL Branches and not full URLs. However, you can use whichever makes more sense for your strategy.

Demandbase Intent

• Since our Keyword Sets are built to be product-specific, we have included all the DB1M focused keyword sets and set the Intent Strength to Exists (because we want to capture all signals).

4. Lastly, we have clicked the Edit Logic toggle and changed our logic to be all “OR” statements which ensures all types of activities listed will qualify into the Segment Group.
5. Repeat this process for all Segment Groups accordingly.

Part 2: Creating custom engagement minute counts

Now that you’ve grouped all relevant Marketing Activities into an Activity Segment by product, you can create your custom Engagement Minute Count fields.

1. Navigate to Settings > Demandbase Calculated Fields, and click on “+ Create New.”



2. Choose the Data Type as “Count of Engagement Activities.”



3. Create the Field Label, this will be the name of the field in DB1M. Ideally, this field label will be mirrored in your CRM via the custom field(s) you have created to hold this data.
4. Now that you have your data type and field name, you want to identify the time period for which you are analyzing the data. We find that using the time period of 1 month and 3 months tends to be the most impactful. Choose your time period and identify it in the Time Range section.
5. Click on the ”Define Criteria” text under the “Only include Activities when…” section. This will bring you to an area where you need to reference the Product Interest Activity segment you created above.



6. Add in the Product Interest Activity Segment and select the desired product’s segment group name, here we chose DB1M. You will then want to delete the Activity Date constraint as we have already set a time period so this is an unneeded constraint.
7. Click Save to return to the field creation screen.

Sync Data with CRM (Optional)

The last step is to map this field back to your CRM, however this is not required if you wish to only use this field in DB1M.

You will notice there are drop down menus for Account and People objects. Search for the custom Account, Contact or Lead field(s) you created in your CRM in the appropriate drop down to map this new field back to your CRM. Once selected, make sure the “Write-back Enabled” toggle is showing blue.

The Results

Now that you have the Product Engagement Minute Counts field, your go-to-market team can easily see which product an Account or Person is most interested in over a given time period.

To use this data effectively, add the new CRM custom field(s) to the Account layout.

A useful CRM trick is to identify the product with the highest engagement. If you’ve created multiple Product Engagement Minute fields, you can set up a simple formula to automatically display the product with the highest engagement count.

These fields provide valuable insights to your GTM team—whether as new data points or as a supplement to existing insights.

Common Use Cases

• Include these fields on reports that show Accounts which have moved into the MQA stage. Instead of just showing these Accounts, you can now show the Account and what product they have exhibited the most interest in
• Add these fields to existing reports such as MQL reports and/or Marketing Program follow up reports to help sales better understand what product they have exhibited interest in
• Embed these fields in reports for Customer Success to help identify potential cross/upsell opportunities
• Create Slack alerts that show recently Engaged Accounts and use these fields to identify their product interest
• Use these fields to find Accounts/People that are not engaged with specific products, then launched orchestrated plays involving both Sales & Marketing
• Utilize these insights in adjacent technologies such as Webchat and Content Management Systems to personalize the experience to show relevant content focused on the most engaged product of that Account or Person

Lastly, here are some examples of other Custom Engagement Minute Counts you can create:

• Persona based Engagement Minute Counts at the Account Level
• Marketing Campaign Engagement Minute Counts at the Account and Person Level
• Marketing Channel Engagement Minute Counts at the Account and Person Level