Engagement History reporting gives us the opportunity to build Salesforce reports based on Pardot marketing asset performance data (you can read the full backstory in this post). In short, marketers can now use standard Salesforce reports for more flexible Pardot reporting, beyond the WYSIWYG out-of-the-box reports.
In this post, I am going to show you how to create a Pardot Email report in Salesforce that gives you an overview of how your list emails and automated emails performed.
At a glance, you will be able to see:
- A breakdown of each email performance related to a campaign (note: you may have more than 1 email per campaign),
- The total emails delivered, email opens, and email clicks in a campaign.
- The delivery rate, click-through rate, click to open ration, spam complaints, opts outs (and more) for a list email.
- Compare email performance for a specific time period (eg. emails that caused the greatest number of opt-outs last quarter)
- Investigate subject line performance, using the highest and lowest email open rates.
This report is designed to be an overview, for Pardot Admin monitoring. What it will not show you, is how each individual prospect engaged with the email; if you are interested in this, check out the ‘Prospect and Activity’ Dataset for B2B Marketing Analytics, or Engagement History Dashboards if you don’t plan on enabling B2B MA in the foreseeable future.
A while back, I showed you how to build a Pardot Landing Page overview report – now, I will show you the same for emails.
Why Engagement History Reports?
Here are some reasons why you should start using Engagement History reports right away. If you are sceptical about the benefits, hopefully, some things on this list will justify that time investment:
- Replaces WYSIWYG report tables in Pardot (what you see is what you get).
- Report on Pardot Marketing Asset performance: Emails (List emails, Engagement emails), Landing pages, Forms, Marketing links (AKA custom redirects)
- Available to all Pardot/Salesforce customers.
- Take advantage of Salesforce report charts & dashboards.
- Little effort, minimal learning curve (especially if you have built custom report types before).
The Finished Product:
In this tutorial, I’m going to building the ‘Engagement Metrics on Emails’ custom report type in Salesforce. This is one of the five report types that Salesforce recommends you build in your org.
Here’s an example of what we are going to build. It’s a bare-bones version, but there’s plenty more you can do with it, which you will find out in the ‘Taking it Further’ section:
Step #1: Create the Custom Report Type
Completing this step will depend on your Salesforce permissions (you will need to access Salesforce Setup and be able to create custom report types).
Go to Setup, and search for ‘Report types’.
Create a new report type:
- Primary Object: Campaigns
- Report Type Label: “Engagement Metrics on Emails”. There’s best practice to how report types should be named to avoid leading fellow users to use the wrong report type, leading down a dead-end! Also, be sure to respect your organisation’s naming convention.
- Report Type Category: Campaigns
- Choose Deployed for it to be visible to users.
Next, we get on to the Object Relationships. Each of the steps below is a new box on the canvas area, select the objects by opening up the dropdown box.
- A = Campaigns
- B = List emails: Each “A” record must have at least one related “B” record.
Step #2: Edit the Default Layouts
Which fields do you want visible when a user creates a report? As this is a custom report type, none of the fields will appear as columns in the report – in other words, the user will have to add these each time! Save them the work, and set the default fields.
You can select any fields for the objects included in the report (in this case, it’s email and campaigns).
Here is the selection you have for emails:
To select a field, double-click and check the ‘selected by default’ checkbox:
Here are some good ones to add for email reports, and how they will be displayed from the user’s point of view when they create a new report, eg:
- Delivery rate
- Click to Open Ratio
- Total hard bounces
Step #3: Build the Salesforce Report
What I did first to understand the data, was to group the emails by campaign; as I suspected, some campaigns had more than 1 email associated to them.
The ‘type’ field shows me whether it’s a List Email or an Automated Email:
I can add any filters on the ‘filters’ tab; a useful filter could be looking at any email sent in the last quarter (FQ):
Note: there is no sent date I could see, but scheduled seems to be the same from the comparisons I was making between Pardot ‘sent’ date field and this ‘scheduled date’ field in Salesforce.
Any of the metrics can be:
- Sum, eg. Total opens for all emails last quarter
- Average eg. the average click-through rate across all emails last quarter
- Min eg. the lowest delivery rate for all emails last quarter
- Max eg. the most opt-outs caused by an email.
When you run the report, the metric/s will appear at the top:
Use case #1: Subject Line Comparison
Do you want to get a feel for which subject lines were getting good open rates? All you need to do is add the ‘Subject’ field, then sort by ‘Open rate’ (descending):
Use case #2: Month-to-month Trends
Let’s look at how you can monitor click to open ratios month-to-month using the same baseline report, making a few changes, and adding a chart.
Add the field ‘Scheduled Date’ as a group row:
This will group emails sent by day, so we will need to change that. We want to group emails by the month they were sent instead. Click on the dropdown arrow on the ‘Scheduled Date’ column → Group Date By → Calendar Month:
The average Click to open ratio for each month is calculated by clicking on the dropdown arrow on the ‘Click to open ratio’ column → Summarize → Average, which will appear in the subtotal line:
Using Salesforce reports means we can take advantage of Salesforce Report Charts and Dashboards.
Click ‘Add Chart’, then the cog icon to open up the options.
A ‘column’ bar graph is best to show month-by-month trends. Ensure the Y-Axis is showing ‘Average click to open ratio’ (not record count):
Finally, click Run (and Save) to view the finished report.
Heads up: Campaign vs. Email Level Metrics
Beware! You may have decided to add all of the fields to the report – which is fine in the beginning when you want to play with all the possibilities on how to display your data. However, be careful around which metrics relate to:
- The Campaign level, eg. ’Total Emails Delivered in Campaign’
- The email level, eg. ‘Click to Open Ratio’ or ’Total Opens’
Hopefully, the images below will illustrate this.
Campaign Level Field:
Email Level Field:
Summary
Engagement History reporting gives us the opportunity to build Salesforce reports based on Pardot marketing asset performance data. In this post, I showed you how to create a Pardot Email report in Salesforce that gives you an overview of how your list emails and automated emails performed. The two use cases I thought would prove popular would be to compare to which subject lines performed best based on open rate, and comparing the click-to-open ratios over time in a month-by-month comparison. There’s also opt-outs and bounces to consider, too.
You can build so many use cases just with this one baseline report. Take it further by adding the report charts to a Pardot Admin Monitoring Dashboard to keep an eye on your overall email campaign performance.
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