Get Started with Reporting in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Measuring the performance of marketing is essential for success in any organization. But reporting can be an ambiguous term for marketers. It has different meanings depending on what you’re measuring, what’s important in your particular industry, and the goals defined by your overall marketing strategy.
To begin making sense of reporting in the marketing technology space, it helps to break it down into three levels which grow in complexity, each providing progressively more useful reports.
Three Levels of Reporting
- Marketing Activity Reports
- Marketing’s Influence on Customer Actions
- Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
It is useful to think about reporting using this framework because each level builds on the prior level while requiring more effort (and expertise) to piece together data from disparate sources. This is especially true for organizations who are new to large-scale platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to reporting.
Level One: Marketing Activity Reports
Marketing activity reports answer basic questions about the performance of marketing initiatives. These reports include activity metrics like impressions, opens, clicks, views, bounces, and unsubscribes. Marketing activity reports can be easily accessed within the Marketing Cloud platform and do not require exporting data or integrating with external reporting tools. The data source for these reports is generally housed behind-the-scenes (by default) in tables called Data Views which contain activity information and can be queried as needed.
Within Marketing Cloud, activity reports can be created in a number of ways. The simplest way to get an immediate read on email performance for one-off sends is to navigate to Email Studio and click on tracking. There you can see the individual performance of each send. To get a more comprehensive view of activity, or to report on different types of email sends, you can use Discover Reports within Analytics Builder to build custom reports using any activity data contained within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Some examples of those include:
- Email Performance by Device
- Best Performing Send Day
- Audience Engagement Over Time
It’s worth noting that, for those using the Einstein Engagement add-on feature for Marketing Cloud, there are some out-of-the-box reports on engagement and send-time optimization (STO). Once enabled, you will have access to dashboards that segment customers into categories and apply predictive models based on historical engagement with campaigns.
Level Two: Marketing’s Influence on Customer Actions
Once a baseline is established for tracking marketing activities, the next step is to understand how those activities impact customer actions. Complexity is increased as the variety of data sources expand to feed reports. In addition, customer action reports will vary significantly based on industry, data architecture, and overall reporting strategy.
These reports should match marketing activities to actions performed by your customers. One common example of a Marketing Influence report is customer conversions by campaign. For example, how many people became a customer for the first time after engaging with one of your campaigns? Other examples of these reports could include:
- Abandoned Carts Completed by Campaign
- Inbound Phone Calls by Campaign
- Appointments Influenced by Campaign
This level of reporting assumes you have a way to track the relevant customer actions AND map those activities back to the campaigns that those customers engaged with. It does not however require the additional step of calculating revenue and costs associated with those actions and campaigns.
Once you begin consistently capturing marketing and customer activity data, you can define how, where, and for whom reports are displayed. Customer Influence reports are often best visualized outside of Marketing Cloud because there are limited options for custom data visualization within the tool. Also, those who will benefit most from viewing the reports may not have access to the Marketing Cloud platform.
If you are using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connect to integrate with Sales or Service Cloud, and are tracking customer activity there, one option is to build and display these within Salesforce. Another common approach is to leverage a data visualization tool, like Tableau, to visualize Marketing reports into comprehensive dashboards. For large organizations looking to scale, a data visualization platform will best enable you for more advanced reporting down the road.
Level Three: Reporting on Marketing ROI
The ultimate goal marketers strive for is reliably reporting on Marketing’s impact on revenue and return on investment. But it’s difficult to get there if you don’t have a foundational reporting structure in place (often built using the two approaches above). In addition to the elements needed for level one and level two reporting, you’ll also need:
- Accurate process for tracking the cost of each campaign
- Ability to capture and ingest financial data in your reporting platform
- A consistent methodology for attributing revenue to campaigns
- Clear vision and strong buy-in from your senior leadership team
The diagram below illustrates the orchestration needed to bring together the data and teams required for measuring Marketing’s impact on financial outcomes.
Reporting on the ROI of Marketing Campaigns
Once you have the pieces in place, have decided on an attribution model, and compiled all the relevant data together, you can begin moving towards ROI reports like:
- Pipeline Influenced by Campaign
- Revenue by Channel
- Return on Investment by Campaign
When it comes to this level of reporting, leveraging a data visualization platform is highly recommended. It will allow for maximum flexibility and enable the sharing of compelling reports company-wide to the stakeholders who will benefit the most.
Start with the Basics and Iterate
If you are just getting started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is an unrealistic expectation to be able to accurately track ROI from each Marketing initiative. But be patient, start with the basics, and expand from there. Building out reporting capabilities iteratively over time will result in more accurate dashboards, better alignment across departments, and more buy-in from leadership which will ultimately help drive the marketing outcomes you are looking for.
