Exploring Reporting Capabilities in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

[This post was originally published on 3rd Dec 2020. It has been updated on 8th April 2022.]

Measuring performance is crucial to all marketing activities, as it helps to evaluate a campaign’s effectiveness. And to measure the performance of campaigns, the reporting capabilities feature comes in handy as it helps to measure the effectiveness of the campaign and assess the goal. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a feature called Analytics Builder, which caters to the requirements listed above. Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports are one of the platform’s least talked about features and yet they are highly important. 

With the Analytics Builder feature, you gain access to a host of different Salesforce reporting options. As a marketer there are three sets of Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports that you should absolutely know of:

• Standard reports – These reports are out-of-the-box reports provided by Salesforce Marketing Cloud to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns. These can be configured without any technical intervention.

• Discover reports –  These are custom  Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports that provide an answer to a specific business question or scenario.   

• Data Views – Engagement data is stored in the backend Marketing Cloud tables and can be pulled via a query activity in Automation Studio; this requires technical know-how.  

We will understand the first two types of reports – Standard and Discover – in this article, and skip the third type, i.e., Data Views, as it requires knowledge of SQLs. 

Standard Reports 

These reports can be used to pull data from channels like Email, SMS, and Journey Builder. They can be pulled based on specific criteria.  

Now, there are various filter criteria under standard reports, which can be pulled to make your campaign effective. Let’s have a look at the types of report filters that can be used for standard reports. 

• Business Value: These are filters used to categorize the type of business value obtained from the reports. These can be of the following types:
  • Customer Acquisition
  • Customer Engagement
  • Customer Retention
  • Message Deliverability
  • ROI / Conversion

• Channels: These channels can be used for reports.
  • Contacts
  • Journey Builder
  • Email
  • MC Administration
  • MobilePush
  • CloudPages

• Users: This filter is used for types of users i.e Reports owners 

• Tools: This filter is used to create reports in different formats like:
  • Bar
  • Chart
  • Trends
  • Line 
  • Table

• Dates criteria: This is a combination of two filter criteria:
  • Date Created 
  • Date Modified

This filter is used to filter the data set into various date-related filters like:

• Last 24 hours
• Last 7 days
• Last 30 days 

Below are the following types of standard reports that can be used to give a leg up to your Salesforce reporting activities.

There are many reports under this category, but we will be focusing on the important Email studio reports only:

• Account Send Summary: This type of report provides a summary of the Email response on an Account level.  

• Campaign Email Job Tracking Summary: This report displays data about each job in a campaign and the relevant email tracking statistics.

• Campaign Email Tracking Summary: This report focuses on tracking email data for each email in a campaign.

• Conversion Tracking Statistics:  This report is about the conversion activity across all your emails.

• Email Message Frequency: This report shows the no. of customers who received multiple emails for a specified period. 

• Email Performance by Attribute: This report shows the different email send reports based on subscriber attributes and preference values.

• Email Performance by Domain: This report showcases the email performance categorized by each domain.  

• Email Performance by List: This report analyses and displays the click-through rate, bounce, and response for each list or group. 

• Email Performance Over Time: This report shows the data for all sends during a specific period. 

• Email Sends by User: This report displays the no.  of emails sent via each account user for a specified period. 

• Forwarding Activity Details: This report shows the list of emails that were forwarded by the subscribers.

• Impression Tracking by Job: This report focuses on a specific content area and no. of times it was sent in the email job.

• Multi-Campaign Tracking Summary: This report shows the comparisons between email performances across campaigns for a specified date.

• Subscribers Not Sent To: This report displays the subscriber who did not receive the emails during a specified date range. 

• Subscriber Most Recent Activity: Displays a list of all subscribers and details their most recent open or click activity.

• Spam Complaints Over Time: This report talks about the spam complaints collected historically. 

• Sendable Data Extension Performance Over Time: This report focuses on analyzing a sendable data extension over a period to make sure that it is useful for future purposes. 

Discover Reports 

This category of Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports are used to create the following types of reports: 

• Audience Engagement Over Time: This report helps identify the group of contacts that is engaging more with the email content in the last 3 weeks.

• Best Performing Send Day: This report helps you identify which day of the week is best for sending the emails; it is based on the last 30 days of data.

• Deliverability Complaint Rate: This report shows the delivery-related complaints from the top 15 domains like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. in the last 15 days.

• Email Performance by Device: This report focuses on the types of devices used by the customer to access the emails – it can be a mobile device or a desktop. This report uses the last 30 days of data for analysis and can also zoom to the level of specific devices. 

• Email Sending Performance: This report displays the email send performance during a specified period. 

• Recent Email Send Summary: This report summarizes the email sends for the last 30 days.

• Time Between Send and Engagement: This report shows how much time does a subscriber take to open & click the email; it is based on the past 30 days’ data.

Wrapping It Up

The reporting capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a blessing for every marketer. Salesforce reporting gives you the freedom to use the various filters that ultimately help measure campaigns’ effectiveness and assess the goal. 

For a detailed understanding of Salesforce reporting capabilities, visit this link.