Email Performance Reporting

IMO there is no correct answer here.

With the method you describe you will get granular and detailed information, but only for those records where the activity was actually recognized and stamped on the person's record. Do bear in mind when downloading this data that it will contain personal data and should therefore be handled according to data privacy regulations.

With the inbuilt Email Performance report, you will get the overall numbers only, that is true. But it also has some logic applied that will give you a more complete picture. If, for instance, a click is registered but for the same person no open was registered, the Email Performance report will include this person also in the Opens count.

So in essence, they are two completely different ways of reporting and it depends on your use case which one is the more suitable.

Hi Robert,

I would be interested in the use case for requesting the raw data. Is it to have a better overview of who is doing specific actions?

I always used the high level overview in the Email Performance reports to analyze results and determine success for email campaigns. The numbers there help a lot with determining if open rates are going up or down, which emails cause the most unsubscribes, etc. I also created internal benchmarks on an annual basis based on these reports.  

While it's not exactly the question, the "best" way to do this (in my opinion) is to push Marketo activity data into a data warehouse, then into a BI tool such as Looker / Tableau. That gives you the maximum amount of control over the output and visualisations, removes any manual effort to download data/pivot it in Excel/send to stakeholders, and allows you to combine it with other data sources such as purchases.

Of course, this isn't straightforward, but that should be the goal.