Getting more EXM statistics out of Sitecore

Are you missing the best landing page performance statistics in Sitecore EXM? With the Experience Extractor you can get insights about the EXM statistics and use them to optimize your email campaigns.

In this blog I want to show you how to get more detailed information out of Sitecore EXM. The starting point of this blog is an up and running Sitecore platform (8.x) with Sitecore EXM (3.1 or 3.2) and the Experience Extractor and an EXM message which has already been dispatched.

Sitecore Experience Manager
By default Sitecore EXM has a reporting funnel report about a message where total recipients up till the productive recipients are visible.

At this point you can see how many recipients did receive the message and opened it and came back on the Sitecore platform. You can also open the related engagement plan with Silverlight to get the same statistics, but with more different automation states.

Within the scope of this report it is not possible to check which landing pages are performing best or less. To get this data you have to take a different approach.

The first thing you have to know is that there are only links within the scope of EXM. This means that links are not measured by EXM itself, but within the scope of a visit when the recipient will be visiting the Sitecore platform. But now you have to which visits are related to a specific EXM. You can achieve this goal by using the marketing campaign. Each EXM message is related to a campaign. By default EXM will create one with the name of the EXM message.

After the campaign is created you can setup specify the required campaign groups of the message. For example if you dispatch EXM messages for different brands you can create setup campaign groups for each brand and relate it to the campaign.

Experience Extractor
To get a specific data extract from Sitecore you can use the Experience Extractor. You can install this tool using the installation steps in the repository. With this tool you are able to export Experience data to Excel. The tool runs different ETL tasks and provided it into tabular data.

If you have installed the Experience Extractor:

From the Launchpad, start the experience extractor
Setup the dimension filter to get the required information. For this case we need the following
Check the “Date” field
Check the “By Campaign” field
Check the “By Campaign group” field

Setup the filter
Select the date range
Select the sampling percentage
Leave the SSAS tabular empty (we use the default export)

After setting the filter press the Update Shell button.
Now the filter is setup, you can start the extract process by clicking the submit button. While processing a progress bar is shown, and finally a download link is shown.
Download the provided packages and extract it to a folder. Take notice of the MS Access Database in the package.

Create a report
From Microsoft Excel it is possible to create pivot tables based on an external data source, for example an MS Access Database provided from the Experience Extractor. So in the pivot table configuration to the following:

Add the “Date” field to the “Columns” section
Add the “ByCampaignLabel” field to the rows section
Add the “ByEntryPageLabel” field to the rows section
Add the “PageViews” (or “visits”) field to the values section

From the report you will get an overview contain all page views per date per campaign in a logic overview. If you merge it with the default EXM data, you are able to extend the default report with landing page totals of the specific campaign and make the report more complete.

If you have multiple campaign grouped by different campaign groups, you add the “ByCampaignGroupLabel” field to the rows section above the “ByCampaignLabel”.

Conclusion
The Experience extractor can you deliver a lot of insights what happens within the experience database. The only thing you have to know is how to get the right data out of the Experience database.

So to meet the requirement of our stakeholder we only had to install the Experience Extractor, configure the required extract and setup the report in Excel.

Please note that in Sitecore EXM 3.3 reporting is more extended and the landing page statistics are reported by default.

Onze technische blogs zijn in het Engels. Dit doen wij omdat wij menen dat technische kennis van Sitecore en Sitefinity grensoverschrijdend moet zijn. Wij leren veel van buitenlandse developers, wij delen onze kennis ook graag met hen. Mochten er in de code fouten zitten of punten ter verbetering, dan gaan we graag het gesprek aan.