Reporting for active contacts

[rebecker]

What's the best way to create a report for active contacts (contacts that have opened an email)? I want to see how my active list sizes changes M/M

[Katja_Keesom]

Oh wow, there's too many levels I want to answer this on...

1. Please think hard about whether your Open metric has any value. The email open activity is sent back to Marketo whenever a recipient has downloaded the images. This gives both false positives and false negatives, as clients that have a setting to auto-download are marked as opens, whereas people who actually do read the content but not download the images don't. Pretty widely discussed on this platform and making it a very dodgy figure to use.
2. I would always look at a broader metric than just email interactions, the world is bigger than just email. One thing that could be interesting to set up is a single datetime field that is stamped every time the person interacts with your content. Of course you would need to decide which activities are included here, but that could be email clicks (as long as they are not bot activities), form fills, web page visits, chat interactions, etc.
3. Wit a people performance report you can set up smart lists meeting criteria for different groups you want to report on and customize your report by adding these columns.

Hope this helps you in thinking through a reporting structure that adds value to your business.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Everything you said here, plus...

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Please think hard about whether your Open metric has any value. The email open activity is sent back to Marketo whenever a recipient has downloaded the images. This gives both false positives and false negatives, as clients that have a setting to auto-download are marked as opens, whereas people who actually do read the content but not download the images don't. Pretty widely discussed on this platform and making it a very dodgy figure to use.

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... any user of Apple Mail (iOS or desktop) with Apple Mail Privacy Protection enabled will appear to download every email, regardless of whether they ever saw the message. This further pollutes the already dirty metric.