Dynamics 365 Marketing provides organizations with the ability to plan and execute customer experiences through which they can engage with their customers. Dynamics 365 Marketing includes visualizations and dashboards to allow organizations to perform the analysis of this insights data. In addition to the out-of-the-box reporting, customers require the ability to create their own custom reports.
Overview of Dynamics 365 Marketing
Within the Dynamics 365 Marketing product there are two main modules which group the available functionality: outbound Marketing (OBM) and real-Time Marketing (RTM). Each carry their own features but, from a reporting perspective, they provide similar capabilities in-app insights which cover the more common uses and analysis. In RTM this is provided through PBI Embedded reports as well as operational analytics for a selected channel asset (Access and interpret analytics (Dynamics 365 Marketing) | Microsoft Learn) while OBM provides Insights controls in the Email, Journey and Contact forms (Analyze marketing results and gain insights (Dynamics 365 Marketing) | Microsoft Learn)
The difference occurs is in how the interaction data is stored. Both keep track of the way marketed contacts react to marketing messages and provide detailed analytical views to help organisations understand the impact and analyse the ROI of executed campaigns. Each key marketing table provides statistics, analytics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the marketing results. These insight categories cover a wide range of activities like email interactions, web interactions, form interactions etc.
When outbound marketing was designed, it created an architecture which utilized Azure storage to hold the interaction data for the journeys. This provided faster response times than what was possible in Dataverse at that time. Dataverse has evolved and a managed data lake is now available within it, providing the faster storage that Dynamics Marketing needs. Real-Time Marketing makes use of this storage to take the place of the previously created Azure storage. The resulting architecture looks like this:
Dynamics Marketing Custom Reporting
Up to this point, the approach followed by organizations was to replicate the data to additional storage and then build the custom reports on this replica data store. This approach presented challenges to properly secure the exchange of data between the Dynamics data store (aka Dataverse) and a customer repository. In addition, it requires the development and maintenance of the code to move the data.
In the future, what Dynamics Marketing will allow is the possibility to create custom reports using Power BI directly, without requiring data to be exported to additional storage. The flexibility provided within Power BI should provide customers with the tools to monitor their journeys and channels, creating reports to slice based on their preference and reporting needs. This method of creating custom reports will allow for the joined reporting of OBM and RTM interactions and will be announced when it becomes available.
No changes in reporting with “outbound marketing only” interactions
For customers that require custom reports that include “outbound marketing only” interactions they will be able to continue using the export to Azure Blob Storage feature. This feature continues to be supported and can be safely used as needed. To be able to use this feature customers will need to provision an Azure Blob Storage and create a “Shared Access Signature” and use this URL to create a new analytics configuration record. After this is completed, Dynamics 365 Marketing will begin to export interaction data as individual files to your blob storage container, and you can start using this data for your custom reporting requirements.
Step by step instructions to use this feature can be found here.
