Having access to campaign analytics is crucial. It not only allows marketers to measure the success of their strategies and make data-driven decisions to enhance future endeavors and boost ROI and engagement, but it also empowers them to spot exciting trends, preferences, and customer behaviors — paving the way for targeted and personalized messages, delivering a customer experience that fosters satisfaction and loyalty. Braze enables this and more with their real-time report builder and campaign/canvas analytics.

In this video, Brett Billups, a Solutions Architect at Stitch, walks through:

• Navigating the campaign dashboard within Braze
• Highlighting how to build a campaign report
• Customizing engagement reports
• Understanding email performance reports.

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Transcript

 My name is Brett Billups, and today we're going to talk about Campaign Reporting, you can find it in a couple of places in the UI. So let's get started. You can see my screen now. I've shared it. 

We'll first start here on the dashboard. You actually have some app analytics that is tied to your web SDK, or your mobile app SDK, whether that's iOS or Android. We're not gonna focus on this now, but this is the home dashboard of your Braze UI. Where we're gonna first go before we even get into the analytics portion of this is to the messaging and campaigns. The reason for this is if we click on the messaging tab, we have the option to go to campaigns. Within the campaigns, this is where I wanna show you guys tags. If you don't already have your campaigns tagged, please tag them. As you can see here, I have a couple of tags associated with this particular campaign, and if we go and click on the campaigns that we want to tag, we can set our own tags right away. Within this part of the UI, you just type in whatever you want.

Click create a new tag. Again, that tag would then be associated with those campaigns, and then you can use that tag for filtering whenever you're trying to look at different dashboard views or build reports for your campaigns. Now, let's add it to the analytics section. Within the analytics section, there are a couple of things we're gonna look at today. We're gonna look at Report Builder, we'll take a look at engagement reports, and we'll take a look at email performance analytics dashboards. And then SMS, we won't take the time to look at that today, but it's the exact same thing as email performance, but specifically for SMS campaigns. So we'll hop into these and we'll show you guys what we can do.

So within the report builder, what we have the option to do is build a report. Obviously, when you're building a report, you're going to want to look at some more granular analytics. You wanna be able to do analysis on that data, on those metrics. Try to find trends or find things that could be relevant to the campaigns and the campaign's success. A lot of times the data within these reports can then drive data for your dashboards. So we'll start with creating a new report. We have two options here. You have the manual campaign or you have the automated campaign selection. These are pretty close in feature. The only large difference is if we go ahead and head into the automated campaign section and I say, let's get analytics for the last year, or the last six months, in this case, seven months, it's gonna bring up all these campaigns. Right? And now since this is the automated campaign report builder, all of these campaigns are gonna automatically be included in my report, whether or not I want 'em to be. Now this is helpful if you may know exactly what you want, or maybe you want to go ahead and use your tags and whittle it down and group them by your tags and just get those particular campaigns and you wanna report on those. It's not particularly helpful if you're just trying to get a broader view of how many campaigns you have out there, and you wanna go and select which ones you wanna actually report on. So if we wanna be able to have the same ability to filter, but then select. Then we'll move to the report builder.

Again, we'll create a new report and we'll go to the manual reporting. Within the manual reporting, I can do the same thing when I open up. My search results for the last six months. Once the last six months are pulled up, you see the exact same list that we saw in the automated reports, but within this part of the UI inside of this manual version, we then have the option to select exactly what we want to be able to look at here. I'm interested in looking at anything that actually has sends attached to 'em. So I see everything we've done in the last six months, and then I'm going to select anything that has a send associated with it.

We'll imagine that all these campaigns were geared towards getting people to log into the app and we're gonna build a report and drive it against that. I'll take a step back there, and speak to that when you're building these reports. You wanna make sure that the reports that you are building are relevant to your goals or relevant to some curiosity or something, that will bring you value or eventually bring the business value. In this case, we're trying to drive app visits. So the point of this report is gonna be for me to see which one of these campaigns is driving the most app visits. Then I can try to dig deeper into that channel, or maybe it's the message within that channel that's driving it and I could start applying those strategies to other parts or other channels within the business. 

We're gonna go with all the ones that we selected here, and I think I got all of them that have us send associated. So let's compare campaigns. Now once this loads up, you're gonna see very like, spreadsheet-like data here where, you have all the data that's relevant to your campaigns, all the data that's collected. We have conversions, events that are collected we have sends, we have opened different types of clicks and click rates, and unsubscribed bounces. So we have all that data available to us that we can look at. We can do an analysis and try to find those trends.

One of the cool things about this part of the UI here is there is a new feature called charts. You can either click this button, it'll shoot you down to the bottom, or you can scroll down to the bottom and there's a chart here. Right now that chart is empty, but if you go and say, Hey, I'm gonna look at all the messages sent. We're looking at our different channels, our different types of campaigns that went out. We had an API trigger. We had a web push, we had some email triggers. We had some content cards going out. So you can see those are all the messages sent. These are all the types of messages that were sent. Now we can add a metric here and like I told you guys before, I particularly wanna look at primary conversion events. So primary conversion event is started session within three days. So that means we sent the message and then within three days they hopped into any of our apps that we have associated with our app group. 

Looking at this data at a quick glance, I can see that my content card campaigns are the most effective. Now I can go start looking into what's the copy in there. What am I doing in there? What messages, what are the CTAs in the inside of that? Or even, should I push more messaging through that channel because my particular user base is responding to it. Well, this is a nice quick view where I could start making some of those, assumptions and then start digging deeper into those assumptions and hopefully finding something useful to the business.

As you build these charts or build these views and reports, you can export these reports and it'll export this data, out to you. Or you can save it and if you hit save on it, it'll have the name of the campaign here. So I did a really bad job. So let's hop back in there because I forgot to name the campaign. One of the other poor things is naming your campaign. And when thinking about naming your campaign, you want to make sure that it's relevant to what you're reporting here. Right? We specifically talked about we're looking at different messages. All are part of the same campaign. And in this particular case, we're looking at app views, right? Or app visits. So I would want to call this report, something like Braze the Bar, and this is going to be our campaign message conversion.

Alright. That's relevant to me because I know that we're looking at the messages and we're looking at those conversions on those messages, right? And I can get even more specific. I could probably, even dial down the naming and said app visits, right? And that's gonna be an even better naming convention. Even if you start naming it and you're like, oh, I could do better, you could hit the edit button. And now I can go back and say message app conversion, app visits (and spelling is key) conversions. Right. It's a little mouthy, but it explains exactly what I'm looking for. Right? And as I showed you, if we mess up, we can always go back, hit the edit button, and fix the naming convention. We'll go ahead and save.

 Now that's been saved again here. We can edit this report if we want to. If we wanted to go back and change elements, add different campaigns into it, add different channels into it, or text some out, right? We have the ability to do that by clicking that edit button. Right now, we won't do that. We'll go ahead and cancel back out and then we'll go back to the reports. Now that we've saved our report, we can see we have our campaign message and app visit conversions. Very clear on what we're trying to do here. And if we click on that, we'll see the same view that we just saw. We can go back and see our chart, view our chart. So the next thing I wanna look at here within analytics is our engagement reports.

We just looked at the report builder and we built a report for a campaign. Within that report, we went ahead and saved it. We also had the option to export that data to ourselves. Another way you can export data to yourself and get a more custom view. If you notice within that view all the attributes we've set. We didn't have the ability to choose the attributes we wanted to look at for our report or report on. It just gave us all the attributes associated with the campaigns. So if we go to engagement reports, this doesn't give us a visual of the report, but we can create ourselves a report and that report will be emailed to us. Within this creation tool right here, once again, you have the manual or the automatic creation option. Down here we have a couple of our campaigns. You can do a combination of campaigns and canvases or just campaigns or just canvases. Within that, we'll add both of our campaigns here that we have tagged with our B2B demo, and we'll hit add stats. So adding stats is where you can now go and customize those attributes that you wanna look at. Like before we were seeing the convergent, the conversion events, we were seeing the bounces, we were seeing the clicks, we were seeing everything. But if all we wanted to do was look at sends, and then this is in this case, it's a different report we're looking at. We just wanna understand the sends and the bounces associated with those sends, and what percentage of sends are those bounces, right? We can then customize our report. We can set it up. We can give the name to this report. Once again, make sure the name's relevant so it's easy for you to search for when it hits your inbox.

It's easy for you to know like, oh, this is the report that I was trying to develop and this is what this report is about. So this is gonna be, a B2B campaign, email, bounce bounces, and just really straightforward, clean name and convention. We know exactly what it is. We can then do a couple of things, do you want zip? Do you want a regular zip? I would recommend zipping it so you don't have a thick file. If you have a lot of data coming through you can do your delimiters, whether, you have your reporting BI tool or maybe even just like your spreadsheet set up to do, pipe delimits versus comma delimits. You have the option to select from that here. Do you know you have to have one of these delimiters? You have to use one of the four delimiters available here. As you see, there's no option for a custom delimiter. And then who to send this to? In this case, I'm gonna send this to myself. If I wanted to send it to another member of the team, I could share that report with another member of the team. You could just keep on adding people by clicking in there, typing in their names, and adding them to that send section. Just gonna send it to me for now. And then down here is where we can essentially let it know how long you want data for. These campaigns have been running for two or six months. Do I want the whole six months, or in this case do I want the last, week or so? This case it's looking at about, right about the last, all time for these particular campaigns for when they started. I can look at, the last seven days if I wanted to just look at the last seven days, or I can look at today only, right?

But in this case, these particular campaigns have only been running since the 25th, so this has given me the entire window for those campaigns. Or, you can include data for the last however many days or weeks if you want to. In this case, I'm gonna go with the date range. Another option here is, how do you want the data to be displayed? Do you want it to show data by days? Do you wanna show the data by weeks, or do you wanna show the data aggregated by the campaigns or canvases? I'm showing it aggregated by the campaigns. Then you have some options to automatically exclude archived canvases or campaigns. If you accidentally clicked or leveraged a tag, maybe, and within that tag, there are some archived campaigns that may not be active, so may not be super relevant to the reporting you wanna do. Anything that has that archive that that system archive tag on it, the system can automatically wipe that from the results for you. You can still just select your tag, and easily wipe out anything that doesn't belong in there because it's archived. Then down here at the bottom, we have the option to send this to ourselves immediately or send it at a designated time. And when you do the designated time setting, you actually have the option to have this sent to you on a recurring basis, so I can have it sent once a month or once a week, and so on and so forth.

You can have that never-ending, or you can have it end at a particular time or after a particular number of sends as you see the option below. We're gonna go, it never ends once a week on Wednesdays. Fine, we'll confirm that. Now, once again, I'm trying to show you guys the different naming convention errors that can happen, or how you can go back and edit them if you need to. Now, in this particular part of the UI, it does not like if you're using spaces commas, and underscores. So you wanna keep your naming pretty clean or keep your naming pretty tight, is what I meant to say there. Basically, we just have to take out the spaces I would recommend in these cases using camel case because if you're using camel case, you can clearly see, where a word starts and where a word ends. And that could just make it cleaner from a visual standpoint. But once again, you're gonna have to, type your naming convention in here with no spaces, no extra characters. All right, we'll confirm. Right here we're just going through and doing a review of the data. If everything looks good, it's coming to me. We have when the data will be displayed, we have our campaigns. We could double-check that. Then down here we have the specific options we picked for our attributes to be showcased.

We launched that report and when you hit launch report, that report gets sent to you, right? And then it's gonna be recurring, so that thing's gonna come to me weekly, so that's our engagement reports. The last thing I wanted to cover with you all is email performance and SMS performance as well. Once again, these are the exact same. It's just this system automatically is going to aggregates your email performance data here. It'll aggregate the SMS performance data in the other option. But here, this gives us a quick dashboard view of our email channel engagement and how our emails have been performing. As you can see here, we have a hundred percent delivery rate. It gives us all those important metrics right in our face so we can see how well our campaign, and our email channels doing we can quickly see if there's something off or weird. Notice down here, you see, compared to the last period right now, this is automatically showcasing about 12 months of data. We're gonna whittle that down and then so we can actually see some data, right? There's, look, what this does is it looks at your period and then it goes one period back. So this is looking from, 2022 to 2023. That particular piece of the metric right here is looking at 2020 to 2022, right?

But there's no data for it to compare, so there's nothing there. So if we come down here and we do the last week. Here we go. That's true. There we go. We do the last month of data. We have some of these where we have at least sent some other stuff last month, within this sandbox, of course, that we're looking at here. 

And now since we've got a view where we can see comparable data. We can now see these metrics coming up that we're at 30 per 3% lift in the amount of emails that are sent month over month. You can kind of see that month-over-month, year-over-year, week-over-week view by changing, your filter to how long it appears you're looking at, and then it'll automatically give those comparables statistics down there at the bottom. Now this part of the UI, there's not a ton you can do here, but we can once again filter, do some filters here with our date, which helps us, do some comparisons. It gives us a very good overview quickly of how our email channel is performing. We can show the data in a couple of different ways. Like, we have shown changes in totals, so we're seeing, compared to the last period, a total of three. And then if we go here, we can do show a change in percentages. And then, no change compared to last, a hundred percent delivery rate. And that means, last time around we had a hundred percent delivery rate as well, right? So there's no change. It was a hundred percent last time, it was a hundred percent this time. But from a total perspective, there are four total emails delivered whereas there were only three delivered last time. There's a 33% increase ‘cus we sent and delivered successfully. 

So hopefully you know that all congeal for you. So another option here, other than showing those in like the delivery rate versus the number of emails delivered versus the totals, we can filter down by our tags. Once again, why tags are important? So if we only wanted to see the performance of our B2B demo emails, we can apply here and we're going to have to widen the range a bit here. Go here, and once we widen that range a bit. We can then see, there are four total cents for our particular campaign. There's no comparable period for this. But once again, we can see that those particular campaigns that are tagged with our B2B demo, we can see their performance as well, they’re performing awesome. 

And then down here at the bottom, you get your little performance over time chart. You can look at it with a couple of different metrics like if you wanted to look at the total sends versus the total opens. You know the opens are now in yellow, and then the sends are in blue. You notice the opens are way up because that is not a unique open. Those are total opens. But if we went and switched to unique opens, then, you know there was one send, one open at that point. Right. 2 clicks, two opens here, and then right here we have one send, one open. So you can just click these different metrics and compare them to each other. See them on the chart together and see that data over time. Obviously, if you're sending high volumes, these charts will be up and down and give you a lot of like quick trending information. That's really it. There's not a lot that you can do in this, but once again, it's a dashboard view that gives us very quick information to make decisions on and also gives us the very quick ability to see trends.

And that'll do it. That's it. So we looked at some campaigns and the reporting that we can do against those campaigns and even dashboards we could view against those campaigns. And hopefully, you gained a little bit out of this. My name is Brett Billups. I'm a solutions lead here at Stitch, and if you ever need a spot, we're here to help you raise the bar.