Difference Between Campaign Performance Report and Downloading Data Through Campaign Results Tab

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I've been pulling reports for my teammembers to check out how their email campaigns have been running but I noticed a discrepancy in two different ways that I was looking at the report.

One way that I pulled a report is through the Campaign Email Performance Report and the other way I pulled it is by downloading the data on the results tab of the smart campaign. But when i compare the two reports, I get very different numbers. I've spoken to a Marketo employee about it and he's been gracious in tryign to explain it but it's just not clicking in my mind. I'm hoping that someone else would be able to explain it in a way that I can understand.

He basically said that one report focuses on the leads "actions"  like delivered, bounced, unsubscribed etc. while the other focuses on the leads "activities" like open, clicks, etcs.

But my issue is that I get all of those numbers when I download the data throug the results tab on the campaign. So what's the difference?

Can anyone help?

[Michelle_Tizian]

Hey Stephen,

Did you ever get any resolution to your question?

[Anonymous]

Ehy Stephen, I am a new Marketo user and found exactly the same issue. I don't clearly understand the answer you got from the technical support. 

What would be interesting is to understand how the two (Email performace report and Row data from Results) are generated. Clearly not from the same source. 

Please guys at Marketo.... can you clarify?? 

In particular we have noticed a differet deliverability. This is what is one of our concerns.

Thanks

Danilo

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hi Guys,

Email Performance and campaign email performance have two different primary ways that they differ from recorded activities.  The first is how deliveries are calculated.  Between Deliveries, Soft Bounces and Hard Bounces, Email Performance reports treat the most recent event among these activities as the record stat.  If a mail server emits a delivery notification and then subsequently emits a soft bounce notification for an email, email perf will record this as a soft bounce and subtract the delivery from the count.  Similarly if we first get a soft bounce, and then a subsequent delivery, it will be recorded as a delivery in email perf.  Campaign activity will recorded all of these activities, so export will show skewed statistics if you're trying to determine exact rates based on email-related activities.

The second difference is how opens can be backfilled by clicks in email perf.  In order for an open activity to be recorded, images must be downloaded from the email.  If this doesn't occur, we do not record an open email activity.  However, if a lead clicks a tracked link in your email, we can infer that the email was opened, because the can't have clicked the link without opening the email, so we record an open in addition to a click in email performance reporting, despite not having an explicit activity record for it.

[Anonymous]

I was also curious about why the exported data from an Email Performance Report would over-report key metrics for the identical report on the Marketo UI...Kenny's response makes a lot of sense and, I think, explains things a little better. it would be awesome if we had detailed logic about how this works so we could replicate the logic in the extract/export and then have confidence we could match what's shown on the UI...

But from the general logic, I think we can infer a few more detailed logical filters. Here's how I would summarize it:

First of all, it seems that the Email Performance Report UI differs from the exported version of the report in that the UI reports the most current/relevant information related the the LeadID for that email.

So for example, if there was a soft bounce but then subsequently the email was delivered, it seems that the UI will report 1 soft bounce and 0 delivery at first but then CHANGE the metric to 0 soft bounce and 1 delivery.  While the export seems to track (via time-stamp) both activities, thus the count would higher showing 1 soft bounce and 1 delivery for the same LeadID for that email.

I think there must a similar logic for sends to the same LeadID and Email Address where only one is counted. There may be multiple sends because of soft bounces of course!!  So whereas the export may show 3 sends because there were 2 soft bounces at first and 0 delivered, eventually the UI would simply display 1 send, 1 delivered, 0 soft bounce, 0 hard bounces whereas the export would show 3 sends at three different times, 2 soft bounces at two different times, and one delivered with its own time-stamp.

I wonder too if the export under-reports sends in some cases, for example, if the recipient's email client has images turned off, the tracking pixel that tells the server the email was opened will not fire. However, if the recipient clicks on a link in that email, the UI report, if I'm understanding Kenny's response correctly, infers an Open as well whereas the export of the report may not have an actual Open activity time-stamp only a click.

Does that make sense?