Work with Reports in MCP
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define key reporting terms in Marketing Cloud Personalization.
- Navigate the reports dashboard and interpret key metrics.
- Employ reporting insights to enhance personalization strategies.
Overview of Reporting
Regardless of your role, you likely recognize the value of analytics in making informed business decisions. Before launching campaigns or defining segments, it’s essential to understand the data available in the Reports Dashboard of Marketing Cloud Personalization.
This data provides insights into visitor traffic, behavior, and engagement. By analyzing these insights, you can refine your personalization strategy, ensuring your website delivers relevant and impactful experiences. In this unit, you learn key reporting terms, the structure of the Reports Dashboard, and how to use analytics for personalization.
Understand Visitor Data
Marketing Cloud Personalization collects and categorizes data into three primary types—contextual, implicit, and explicit data.
Contextual data is automatically collected based on a visitor’s IP address and referring source. Example of this include geographical location, device type, and traffic source.
Implicit data is captured as visitors navigate your site. Examples include pages viewed, time spent on pages, and scroll depth.
Explicit data is provided intentionally by visitors. Examples include survey responses, purchase history, content downloads, and click behavior.
Key Reporting Terminology
As you analyze data in Marketing Cloud Personalization, there are several important terms you should be familiar with.
- Visits: The number of sessions initiated by users
- Visitors: The total number of unique users accessing your site
- Pathing: The navigation flow of visitors through your website
- Traffic Sources: The origin of visitors before arriving at your site (for example, social media, search engines, referrals)
- Event: Any interaction a visitor has with your site, such as clicks, page views, and impressions
- Action: A specific event mapped in the platform to categorize visitor interactions (for example, button clicks, page loads)
Types of Actions
By defining actions, you can set rules to target campaigns more effectively. For example, if a button appears on every page, you can track its clicks across all pages as a single action for analysis. There are two types of actions mapped in MCP.
- Page load actions: These are triggered when a visitor accesses a specific page.
- Click actions: These are recorded when a visitor interacts with a button or link, including links leading to external domains.
Navigate the Reports Dashboard
The Reports Dashboard in Marketing Cloud Personalization provides insights into visitor interactions, campaign performance, and revenue impact.
Regardless of your access level, you can view reports categorized into different sections. The sections displayed on your dashboard depend on your organization’s focus, such as ecommerce, demand generation, or content tracking.
Report views can be customized to fit your needs.
- Adjust the time frame (for example, today, past week, past month, quarter, or a custom period).
- Add or remove columns by clicking on the column header menu.
- Sort data columns by clicking on column names to organize insights efficiently.
Reports include these sections.
- Revenue: Displays daily revenue totals and revenue-related site activities.
- Activity: Tracks campaign performance, including impressions, goal completions, and clickthrough rates.
- Visitors: Shows unique visitors and the number of site visits within a set time frame.
- Items: Provides insights into product purchases, content views, and top-performing items.
- Recent visitors: Lists all visitors since the tracking beacon was activated, updating in real-time. Note: A green dot in the Recent Visitors Report indicates a visitor currently browsing your site.
For a deeper analysis, reports can be expanded to the Unified Customer Profile. This feature allows you to explore individual visitor behaviors and preferences in real time.
With this data, you can refine your marketing strategies and deliver more relevant content to your audience.
Now that you understand the fundamentals of reporting in Marketing Cloud Personalization, you’re ready to apply these insights to improve your personalization strategies.