Why?
Now that you have got your insights data in Azure. All ready for giving you more value from D365 Marketing than you got before. You still shouldn’t lean back and hope all magic is done for you. As it seems like, then not everything is as smooth as it seems.
The devil is always in the details and sometimes the details are as simple as checking the data. Does the data you export actually match the information you are seeing in your D365 Marketing Insights?
My experience is that, no, it actually doesn’t always match. The numbers visible in the D365 Marketing Insights seems to sometimes disregard various Deliveries or Opens records. (Can be other areas as well, these are just confirmed.) There is more data available to export than the statistics in the application are showing.
This is one of the sneaky problems that only occur in records instead of affecting everything. So, this makes it much more difficult to locate and troubleshoot.
But this is how we took it further..
How?
- We verified that the exported data was correct. This was done by exporting the Deliveries and Opens from the D365 Marketing application. By clicking into the Insights of a Customer Journey, you get the possibility of exporting the contacts that have an Open or Delivered record attached to them.
- Then we compared the 2 lists: Export to Azure and export from Insights and found the differences. This was a bit shocking, as some Customer Journeys showed a difference of 27 emails.
- Just in case there still was an issue with the export to Azure, we double checked the records of the 27 contacts to verify that they did have an Open/Delivered record in their insights. And all of them did.
- This meant that the numbers in the Customer Journey insights were wrong and we have neglected quite a big amount of contacts in our campaigns.
This was how we found out that there was an issue, so naturally we contacted MS support to figure out how exactly the Marketing Insights statistics are calculated and to see if it is us or MS that has an issue 🙂
It took a bit of back and forth with various levels of MS Support until they figured out that the issue was on their end. The feedback we got was:
“Regarding the Issue, Our Dev team found a problem which in some rare cases may cause this number discrepancy.
We have a repair item and it is already fixed and this won’t happen in future.”
This does not of course fix the records that are already in the system, but first for the new ones created in the future.
More info
I hope that this solves the issue for differences in exports and we can begin to trust the numbers in the application again. Though, it is always a good idea to check and see, if they actually do 😉
Here is more information about how MS calculates the different data in Marketing Insights: Glossary of common insights terms (Dynamics 365 Marketing) | Microsoft Docs
