Your Marketing Cloud emails produce no shortage of data, but have you ever wondered the best way to take a deep dive into your engagement data beyond looking at the performance of a single email?
There are two main options within Marketing Cloud that can be used to access your engagement data, and they can help you answer different types of questions or solve different problems.
Tracking Data Extracts and Data Views can be used to pull .csv files of your tracking data. The table below can help you identify when to use either:
| Tracking Data Extracts: | Data Views: |
| Click and configure within Automation Studio | Accessible via SQL Queries within Automation Studio and stored within data extensions |
| Common choice for exporting large data sets to transfer to a BI tool | Common choice when you need to flatten data from multiple tables or filter the data |
| Used to pull individual tables on sends, opens, clicks, complaints, unsubscribes and more | SQL allows user to join with other related data, such as joining opens with demographic data based on a shared subscriber Key |
| Always requires a file transfer activity to move results to the FTP | Results can be viewed within a data extension or sent to the FTP with a file transfer activity |
Here are some use cases for using Tracking Data Extracts:
-Use a Tracking Data Extract to pull all sends in the last 30 days and send file to the FTP to be used in a BI tool
-Use a Tracking Data Extract to create backups for your email unsubscribe or SMS opt-out data and send to the FTP for storage in a data warehouse
Here are some use cases for using Data Views:
-Query the open data view, click data view, sent data view, and unsubscribe data views to find the most recent event date in each per subscriber to create a flattened view of recent activity
-Query the click data view with a data extension that stores subscriber location information to find which geographic areas had the highest click rate
-Query the open data view and job data view to find how different from emails or from names are performing