Is there a way to show users who commonly opening / clicking into email or viewing website ?

[StevieG]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a new user of Marketo and just wondering if there is any way we can build a Smart List or report to show who commonly opening / clicking into email in general or for a certain topic, or viewing our website?

Any guide will be highly appreciated. Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Welcome to the Nation!

First, let’s tighten up some terminology. You don’t want to say “Users” here. You want to say “People” — or, as many of us old-school people say and the platform still uses in lots of places, “Leads”. Users log in to your Marketo instance, you don’t market to them.

To your question: “commonly” is a vague requirement, but you’ll want to create a Smart List with filters like:

• Clicked Email, constrained by Date of Activity and Minimum Number of Times
• the same for other activities, remembering that web activities are only stored for 90 days
  

When you mention “for a certain topic” that depends on your naming conventions. The actual content of an email will not be filterable. Nor (unfortunately) will be the Tags on a Program that sent or contains an email.

P.S. I also like to remind people that when you use a similar SL to determine inactivity (i.e. people who you might purge), you want to make sure you’ve also given them a chance to engage within a time period. That is, you wouldn’t necessarily punish someone for not engaging in 90 days if you’ve messed up your filters and haven’t even sent them anything in 90 days. (There are of course situations where inactivity is a direct proxy for having received communications + not engaging, but that relies on running a very tight operational ship.)

[Darshil_Shah1]

You can use "Opened Email", "Clicked Link In Email" and "Visited Web Page" filters in a smart list and add apt constraints in the filters, including the "Min. Number of Times" constraint to filter out people who engaged with the respective assets > the set threshold of what you'd classify as a significant number of opens/click email CTAs/visits. Also, if you have RCE, you can add in a lot more measures/rows to get more insightful data than a Marketo SL!

FYR, Marketo logs an Open activity only 1x for a person-email combo, so you'd need to be cognizant of that and the open/click activities from email scanners while using these metrics for gauging the engagements/performance of assets. Lastly, a smart list queries data from the lead activity logs, so you should also consider the retention periods of these activities as well. Check out the Marketo retention policy doc here! Hope this is helpful. Let us know if you have questions.

[StevieG]

Thank you Sanford and Darshil for the reply and guidance.

What I'm looking at is actually a summary at a global level for a person that our marketo users can access from Analytics to measure the engagement and activity level from a client from time to time - maybe similar to the web page activity report, except instead of looking at webpages, it measures against all available programs (e.g emails, events, publications, etc). Otherwise, similar to email performance report, except for showing people rather than programs. 

For example, 

Full Name	Company	Job Title	Opened emails	Invite Clicked	Unsusbcribe	First Activity Date	Last Activity Date
John Smith	ABC Limited	CEO	4	1	0	01/02/2022 9:30AM	12/12/2022 1:30PM
Susan Morgan	Super Pty Ltd	Managing Director	3	2	1	05/03/2022 10:30AM	16/12/2022 2:18PM

I've tried to play around with the people performance report including the drill down option, however it doesn't display as how I wanted like the above and the SLs and the custom column options in the setup is still very limited by program-to-program level.  Maybe I'm looking at the wrong setup, can anyone please help guide / advise? Thank you very much in advance.

[Darshil_Shah1]

You’d want to use RCE reports as there you can add the Email Address field as a column in pretty much all the reports. If you don’t have RCE, you’d have to rely on pulling the activity data from bulk activities extract API, do some slicing + stitching, and put together the stats for people based on different activity type ids. 

[StevieG]

Hi Darshil,

Thank you again for your prompt response, apologies for so many questions asked.

I already have a look around and don't think we have an RCE report setup on our Marketo yet; and I think what we want to achieve is much simpler than that.

This is the report that I have created so far (sorry I have to blur the names for confidentiality reason). Now, is there a way I can add another column to display each person's company attributes, job title, country/state, and email address?

Also can I display the number of (how many) emails have a person being sent rather than whether that person has been sent or not, and/or number of (how many) emails the person has engaged with.

If API need to be setup, is there a way you can guide me somehow, please? as my knowledge is limited. Thank you in advance again for all your patience and helpfulness.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, I don't think you'd be able to add multiple attributes vertically (similar to the way you've added Full Name to the report by adding it to the Group By config in the setup), you could drill each row for every field you'd like to see respective field values of people in the report (but honestly, I don't think that'd be practical at all and is very manual as well). I think you're better off using the bulk extract API for this (unless someone in the community comes up with a creative solution for this using the people performance report, which I may have missed seeing). Also, other performance reports (email/LP/etc.) report at the asset level and not at the person level, so you'd not be able to pull person data directly from them as well.

If you don't have experience using APIs, you may need to have the developer documentation in my previous comment looked at by someone who's a bit more technically inclined. I can provide some info regarding using the bulk extract API if you'd like (you can DM me in that case). Thanks!

[Katja_Keesom]

There's already a good conversation going on several practical aspects of Marketo's capabilities, but I would like to zoom out a little bit here and challenge the usefulness of what you want to achieve. As is documented in many posts on the nation, actual email opens are a very poor indicator of actual human behaviour. An Open only means the images have been downloaded, but this could easily have been an email server doing this, so is no indication at all of the person having encountered the content.

Email clicks are a different topic, as long as you are making an effort to effectively recognize bot activities and leave them out of the equation. If you do this diligently, email clicks are actually an indicator of human behaviour.

In general, my best advice for having an indicator of a person's level of engagement is to implement lead scoring, where every active interaction (ranging from email clicks and web visits to event registrations and content downloads to name a few obvious ones) is awarded a score that reflects the value of the interaction in relation to the person's buying intent.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I agree with @Katja_Keesom100%!

It's not that people are not measuring the engagement/buying intent of their audience (which people reading this thread may think, given that there's no OOTB report that'd pull the count of opens or clicks against person records specifically), but rather people measure the engagement/buying intent by implementing a scoring set up which gives an overall indication of how far ahead the person is in their buying journey and how frequently are they engaging with different marketing assets.

Let's not go into a rabbit hole to figure out a solution for this, only to realize it was an XY problem later. 🙂