26 Sep Marketing Cloud Engagement Email Tracking
An Overview of Tracking and Guidance on Upcoming Changes
Opens. Clicks. Deliverability. Bounces. Unsubscribes.
There are a variety of measurements of the success of an email campaign that depend upon these key pieces of engagement data. What trends in our sending behavior do we see recently based on send volumes? What subscriber engagement are we driving with the content we’re sending? Are we reaching our customers’ inboxes successfully? Are customer opt-out rates trending up or down for our email program?
The answers to these questions help to drive our email and content strategies, but to derive the insights we’re seeking we need access to this data. So that leads us to ask: where can we find engagement data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and what forms does it take?
And if you’re already familiar with where to find this data in Marketing Cloud, there are some upcoming changes to how long some of this data is available in the platform that you should know about.
Engagement Data: Where can we find it?
Intelligence Reports:
Under the “Analytics Builder” navigation menu you have access to Intelligence Reports where you’ll find a variety of ready-made dashboards, the ability to create your own pivot tables, and reports you can customize, run and even automate on a schedule. If you have Advanced Intelligence Reports, you can edit and create your own dashboards, and you also have access to Query data with either drag-and-drop logic building or if you’re handy with SQL you can write up your own query. Current Data Retention: Last 2 years.
Reports:
Also under the “Analytics Builder” dropdown you’ll see Reports. Under the Reports features you’ll have access to a catalog of pre-made reports you can either run immediately or set up on a schedule to have emailed to you. A few reports to highlight include: Journey Builder Email Send Summary, Email Performance by Domain and (my personal favorite) Account Send Summary. These reports are fairly static and generally only allow a small amount of customization of date ranges or selection of which email/journey you want to see results for. Current Data Retention: All time.
My Tracking:
In “Email Studio” you have a tab for “Tracking” where you can view metrics for individual sends as well as those from triggers and journeys. You can view the summaries of each send to see things like Delivery, Open and Click rates, and you can even download lists of subscribers for many of the metrics if you need that raw data in a csv format. You can also view an additional tab for more advanced Click activity to dive deeper into which links your subscribers are engaging with (it’s also recommended to use link aliases in your email content to make this tracking feature more helpful). If you have enabled and integrated Conversion tracking with your website/landing pages you’ll have a tab for this as well. Current Data Retention: All time.
Journeys:
For Journeys you’ve activated, you can view an analysis of each Email activity within the Journey itself. You can see high level engagement metrics for a given time frame that you can adjust to show All Time metrics or a custom range. Drill down further by clicking the “View Details” to see a deeper level of analysis of metrics and Click activity. Unlike “My Tracking”, you cannot download files of subscribers from this view, but you can find journey emails under “My Tracking” and download them there if you need that raw output. Current Data Retention: All time.
Salesforce Leads and Contacts (via the Connector):
If your Marketing Cloud account is connected via Marketing Cloud Connect directly to an instance of Salesforce Core for Sales, Service, Health, etc, you have the option of populating certain engagement data from sends directly back to Lead and Contact records in Salesforce (a Salesforce Admin can make page layout changes to those objects to show this data). This is available for sends conducted through Journey Builder or if your sendable data extension is stored in the Salesforce Data Extensions folder structure in Marketing Cloud. You’ll need to be using the LeadId or ContactId as your SubscriberKey in Marketing Cloud for this to work, and you’ll also need to make sure your Salesforce users are set up with the appropriate permissions and licenses to see this tracking data. Current Data Retention: 6 months standard, can increase to 2 years.
Tracking Extracts:
If you need to extract your engagement data regularly to store it in a data lake, warehouse or external analytics tool, under the “Journey Builder” navigation option you’ll see “Automation Studio” where you can set up activities and automate them. Under activities you’ll find configurable setups called Data Extracts that can leverage the pre-existing “Tracking Extract” schemas to deliver an assortment of files to package up and deliver to an external source, whether this is an SFTP, Amazon S3 bucket, etc. There are some views here that are unique to Tracking Extracts, (“Not Sent” being a particularly useful one), and you’ll have the option to pick and choose exactly which datasets you want to include in your extract. Current Data Retention: All time.
Data Views and SOAP API:
For those who aren’t afraid to write up a SQL query, you’ll have access to backend tables called “Data Views” through Automation Studio “Query” activities or through the Query Studio app (available through the App Exchange). The schemas for each of these data views are available in Salesforce documentation. With these you can directly query tables for Sends, Opens, Clicks, Bounces and much more, opening up a wide range of options for developing custom data outputs (in the form of Data Extensions) for segments, custom reporting or your own custom extracts. Current Data Retention: 6 months.
And if you’re comfortable working with the Marketing Cloud API? Yes, you can also retrieve tracking data, specifically through the SOAP API. Current Data Retention: All time.
Engagement Data Retention Updates: What’s changing?
In 2024, Salesforce announced some changes coming to its data retention policy for Marketing Cloud. Specifically, starting January 15, 2025 “subscriber and journey engagement data will be retained and accessible for 180 days.”* For newer Marketing Cloud accounts (since April 2024), this is already in place, but for older accounts this will change a lot about the access you have to your engagement data within the platform.
So, what exactly is changing?
The policy update states that this change impacts “data that you retrieve by using the Email Studio Reports in Analytics Builder, the tracking reports in Email Studio, Tracking Extracts in Automation Studio, or requests to SOAP API.”
Reports
The article’s FAQ section lists which reports are impacted from the Reports catalog, noting that the list is subject to change:
- Journey Builder Email Send Summary
- Journey Builder Email Send Summary by Day
- Unengaged Subscribers for a List
- Single Email Performance by Device
- Region Performance for Triggered Sends Over Time
- Subscriber Most Recent Activity
- Subscriber Engagement
Tracking Extracts
Tracking Extracts are also impacted, which is probably the most important of these updates. These extracts have previously been the only way to grab historical engagement data past 6 months, so when these are limited to 6 months that leaves us without a viable way to bulk extract any historical engagement metrics.
SOAP API
This change will also limit what data you can retrieve via the SOAP API, limiting it to the past 180 days.
Recommendations: What to Do Moving Forward?
Because of this retention update, it’s recommended to start extracting your engagement data on a regular basis: daily, weekly, or monthly. And if you haven’t been extracting your data already, it’s probably a good idea to set up some historical extracts to make sure all the engagement data you’ll need is extracted and stored somewhere before this change goes into effect.
1. If you haven’t explored Intelligence Reports yet or you’ve been relying on the older Reports catalog, the data in Intelligence Reports will continue to be available going back 2 years, so you should be able to create similar reports within Intelligence Reports to replace those reports impacted by the update.
2. In addition to tracking data, you may also benefit from setting up a “Send Log” to capture send-time data in a Data Extension. Marketing Cloud has a specific templated Data Extension to capture data from all sends from the account/business unit and store them. The template itself gets you started with all the required fields: JobId, SubscriberId, etc, but you can also customize the log to capture additional data from each send.
3. Finally, you may also want to consider copying down the Data Views into Data Extensions. In many cases this can also improve the performance of SQL queries you need to run against Send or Open data. Please note: if your send volume is on the higher side, this may be difficult to do based on runtime limits on queries and the volume of data stored in the views.
Need help with setting up Data Extracts, Send Logs or navigating engagement data? We’re here to help. Reach out to contact@offprem.tech to schedule a call!
* “Marketing Cloud Engagement Data Retention” – July 19, 2024. https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=002231187&type=1