Creating reports to showcase the ROI of your marketing automation platform is imperative, yet many people struggle to report accurately. ‘Out-of-the-box’ reporting in Marketo can be really useful if configured properly, but many people are unsure how to take the standard Marketo reports and customize them to get meaningful data. In our recent virtual discussion, we reviewed how to make magic from Marketo reporting. Here are the top four features that optimize the out-of-the-box Marketo People Performance Report.
- Group-by – this feature allows you to group people by ANY (yes, any) field on their lead record. You can use this to group by key demographic points, status values, or really anything to get aggregate counts for your database.
Quick-tip: Group by any data points that should be standardized (country for example), excluding the clean values, to see how many people have incorrect values.
- Custom Columns – this feature enables you to pull on any smart list in your instance that you have access to. You can use this to see how membership in that smart list compares to other lists or the whole database (limit 10 per report).
Quick-tip: Use this as a quick short cut to see counts for multiple smart lists at once.
I like to use this feature a number of ways, two of my favorites are:
- Auditing – when I build a Marketo lifecycle program, I build 30+ smart lists to make sure things are functioning as expected. This feature allows me to view 10 different smart lists at once – which means I am looking at 3 or 4 reports instead of 30+ smart lists.
- Advanced program reporting – Let’s say you run a single PPC program for a product launch that is actually an aggregate of 3 PPC ads; you can create 3 smart lists and combine them into a single report, by leveraging smart lists you get even more control over the data pulled into the report.
- Smart list – the People Performance Report is one of the few Marketo reports you can apply advanced logic to. You can use this to amplify your querying – shortening your load time.
Quick-tip: Make your report run even faster by ONLY looking at the data you need to see.
- Drill down – click on one row of the report to open up a mini people performance report. This feature can be leveraged to really dig into your data which can help you support a number of functions. A few ideas:
- Creating a report of target industries (or companies) and group by job title / function etc. to understand contacts at target companies
- Use this to collaboratively design marketing programs, like targeted whitepapers, events, etc. Do this by digging into key buyer personas to design programs most likely to resonate. For example, filter by all people who have downloaded a white paper this year (using the ‘smart list’ function), group by industry, then drill down to a key industry to group by job role – and tailor your latest whitepaper offering to this audience!
As with all Marketo reports and smart lists, you can subscribe to have the reports delivered to your inbox. If needed, you can also leverage outside tools for visitation, i.e. excel, Power BI, Tableau. All of the above features can be leveraged one at a time or combined. By combing them all, you create the ultimate magical powerhouse report that even the average “muggle” can understand. For more on reporting, check out the entire virtual discussion.
