Better to use Marketo or SFDC reports?

The email performance report is great because you don't get this data inside SFDC.

I like the Company Web Activity Report (which is also in Sales Insight) for checking out potential prospects who hit your site anonymously.

Do you have RCA/RCE? Those may be better at analyzing marketing effectiveness if done correctly.

Otherwise I tend to use Marketo reports for individual campaigns and database counts. I wrote a summary here:
http://www.marketingrockstarguides.com/marketo-reporting-discussion-at-the-nyc-marketo-user-group-563/

There are tons of things that the reports in Marketo do that you can't get in SFDC. We are in the process of rewriting all of the help articles to make this much clearer.  In general, they are both fine and we try to encourage usage of both.  However, I think are some great things you can do with Marketo reports.

A few tidbits:

1. If you want to filter based on activity (clicked link, was sent email, visited web page etc) or inferred data or other items in Marketo, you can filter the report using a smart list.  Can't do this in SFDC
2. You can add smart lists as custom columns.  These are hugely valauble, albeit a little slow.  We are improving the performance of this in 2013 by alot.
3. Web Activity report is awesome.  Subscribe to it to see leads and anonymous leads visit your website every day.  
4. Drill-down is cool
5. Program Performance is cool
6. And of course RCA brings it to a whole new level with first touch and multi-touch attribution.  None of which is in SFDC

We are making it easier, but there is alot of power in there.  I hope this is helpful.

Out of the box, I think both are pretty poor compared to any half decent business intelligence tool.

Marketo Analytics lets you create high-level, aggregated reports, but you can't get down to the detail. To do this, you need to use smart lists, but these can't be scheduled / emailed to the sales team.

With Salesforce, you can schedule and email reports ... but, you are fairly restricted on which parts of their data model you can report on an any one time and most frustratingly of all, you can't report on leads and contacts within the same report (e.g our sales team like to see an Interesting Moments reports each week).

So, currently we use Smart Lists in Marketo for our low level reporting and manually export these into Excel every Monday, applying some sorts and formatting and them email out to the sales team.

Are there any good training materials/webinars/videos that dive deeper into Marketo's analytics?  We currently do not use the Marketo add on for Revenue Cycle analytics, but I want to get a bit more knowledgeable about what I can find out using Marketo Analytics.  For example, I didnt know that you could pull in smart lists as columns in reports.

Thanks!
-a very new Marketo User. :)

Hi Erin,

I'm the product manager for reporting and analytics at Marketo and we are committed to making the help articles better.  I’d love to help you and will reach out to you personally.

TJ

Hi Rodney,

I would say, it depends by function. Sales would be better to refer to Salesforce as it provides transparency and nearly real-time reporting. For example, I create Last Interesting Moments reports for sales teams and they love it - they don't even have to request it from us.

If you are a marketer, reports out of Marketo are a must. As a few posts above mentioned the benefits. To make the long story short, if you set things up properly, you can get basics in Salesforce. Frankly speaking, a year and a half ago I would have sent you to SFDC but Marketo drastically improved their reporting interface and matured analyzers product. If you are an advanced user, RCA/RCE provides incredible visibility into your sales funnel KPIs.

Inga

Hi Erin,


I always like to start with this training for my clients: 

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KyuRCAS

There is  a PDF and a webinar and does a good job of covering standard Marketo Functionality.

Keep in mind some new functionality is not yet included in that training.
 

Thanks,
M

Thanks, I will check out that training.  Thanks M!

All good points here. I go through each of the basic reports in my new Guide and having done that I think it is clearer how to use them. Unfortunately, you may still find it difficult to completely tie together the funnel unless you setup RCM and RCA/E or just use SFDC for the general funnel.

Marketo reports will still show you a great deal on email and other activity that just is not visible in SFDC.