Seeking richer email performance metrics

Hey Jamie, great question.

Ultimately it comes down to this: what audience are you reporting to? I try to steer people away from focusing too much on engagement based metrics outside of the circle of users/stakeholders who really are involved in the system and know about the day-to-day projects we're working on, etc.

It's not that engagement metrics aren't valuable at all, but that they're often vanity metrics that don't really do much to prove that businesses are generating value out of their investment into Marketo. So beyond the immediate group of users, I try to use them as a support to other metrics that show value more explicitly - leads generated, opportunities created, revenue generated, etc; whatever those meaningful metrics are for you.

For me, that means I'm looking at things like...

• Google analytics (and its equivalents) is particularly valuable if you have ecommerce tracking, but generally still is good.
  • I use this to prove revenue generated from Marketo traffic, and how that's performing MoM + YoY
  • I use this to prove that traffic driven through Marketo is high quality - generally looking at bounce rate, pages per session, ecommerce conversion rate/goal conversion rate, total revenue generated + avg transaction value.
  • I also use this to prove the impact of web personalisation campaigns - looking at most of the same metrics as above.
• Google data studio (and its equivalents) helps us tie in data from multiple sources and keep them in a digestible, readily available and consistent format for stakeholders.
• We look at how engagement then ties to performance; so whether Marketo leads convert cheaper/faster/at a higher value etc. And - like you say with meeting conversions - looking at those pre-sale milestones too.

Implementing data enrichment processes/campaigns is super valuable when done well, but ultimately it's about what you do with that data. If you're then able to use that level of data to target more effectively, personalise more meaningfully... I wouldn't look at the data sourced from these tactics as metrics so much as I'd look at whether participation in these campaigns correlated to performance/conversions.

I do use Litmus; I find the analytics informative and helpful, but the analytics here stay within the user team. Its predominant use is to inform our dev priorities - the engagement stuff is mostly just a neat to have extra level of interest that never goes higher.

This is long but I guess the TLDR; is that at the end of the day, when we're reporting to stakeholders & execs we have to speak the same language as other Marketing/Sales channels if we want a slice of the budget or attribution pie - which means ultimately it's all about what you did that drove leads, opportunities and conversions more effectively than them. Other metrics can add colour and texture to the picture, but I find too often they're actually used to distract from the fact that the truly meaningful metrics either a) can't be proven or b) are performing poorly.