Explore Your Data with Pivot Tables

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe pivot tables and when to use them.
• Create a pivot table in Intelligence Reports.
• Explain the different ways you can export a pivot table.

Make the Most of Your Data with Pivot Tables

Pivot tables allow you to explore your data from multiple perspectives. You can use pivot tables to filter, sort, and group large volumes of data according to any metric or dimension. Plus, with pivot tables, you can create custom reports that organize, summarize, and slice your data without the need to write and run queries. 

This means you can easily create a pivot table that shows a breakdown of your email send data, so you can see how many emails were sent, delivered, and bounced for a specific time period. You can also use a pivot table to see which send day had the best performance—meaning which day had the highest open rate, click-to-open rate, and email opens. The options are endless. 

In this module, we assume you are a Marketing Cloud user with the proper permissions to access Intelligence Reports to create pivot tables and scheduled reports. If you’re not, that’s OK. Read along to learn how your admin would take the steps in a production org. Don’t try to follow these steps in your Trailhead Playground. Marketing Cloud isn’t available in the Trailhead Playground.

Let’s see how Paulo, a marketing specialist from NTO, uses a pivot table to explore which email performed best. 

Create a Pivot Table

Paulo navigates to Pivot Tables in Intelligence Reports and clicks Create New Pivot Table. He then sets up the pivot table in just a few steps. 

1. First, he enters a name for the pivot table.
2. Next, he sets the dates for which the data is pulled. In this case he wants to see last month’s data.
3. In the Settings dialog, he begins defining the pivot table’s dimensions, measurements, and more.
4. He selects Email Name and Email Subject for the dimensions (by default, dimensions are set as Rows).
5. He selects Email Open Rate and Email Click to Open Rate for the measurements (by default, measurements are set as Values).
6. He adds an optional filter so that only NTO emails are included.
7. Finally, he clicks Apply when he’s done.

After clicking Apply, Paulo can see his pivot table with results that show the best-performing emails based on high open and click-to-open rates.

Export a Pivot Table

Once you’ve created and customized your pivot table you can now export it. There are a few different ways you can export. 

• Export: This option exports the pivot table to an Excel file either as a pivot table or flat table.
• Schedule export: This option exports directly to a report format (either pivot table or Excel), which can be set to run as part of a workflow, in real time, or according to a defined schedule. We cover reports in more detail in the last unit.

Now that you know more about pivot tables, move on to the next unit so you can learn more about reports.