Creating a Clicks report for Sitecore Email Experience manager (ECM)

Recently I was out on site with a client working through an ECM implementation and some questions came up around the reports that are provided out of the box. The reports that are provided out of the box are all looking at the value of a user interaction with an email, as opposed to whether they clicked a link in an email or not. While this provide you a much more rounded picture of how a user interact with an email and what value you can associate with a particular send a lot of people are still expecting the traditional "Click" report that you get from other email platforms.

So, I decided to build one.

The first thing to note is the ECM has been built to be extended and that it already collects all of the information to produce a click report. I recommend looking at the following to see how you can customise ECM:

• https://www.sitecore.net/en-gb/learn/resources-library/brochures/sitecore-email-experience-manager.aspx - a PDF of a presentation by Sitecore on the ways the ECM can be customised
• http://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/sitecore-magnified/posts/2013/09/ecm-automation-states-magic.aspx - A blog post by Kate Butenko around how the ECM tracks data in the analytics database

Now that you have the background on where to customise ECM and where it stores its data, its just a matter of pulling the pieces together to build your own report.

I have open sourced an implementation on my git repository over at https://bitbucket.org/ctekempel/ecmreports and hope to add some more detail about the implementation when I get some time, but thought I would put it up now just in case I don't. Once you pull down the git repo you will need to:

• Compile and copy across the appropriate files
• Deserialize all of the items in the "items" folder
• Add a report to each of the task types report pages in the ECM:
• /sitecore/system/Modules/SPEAK/EmailCampaign/TaskPages/AdHockTaskPage/Reports
• /sitecore/system/Modules/SPEAK/EmailCampaign/TaskPages/PeriodicalTaskPage/Reports
• /sitecore/system/Modules/SPEAK/EmailCampaign/TaskPages/TrickleTaskPage/Reports

• To add the report you need to add a “/sitecore/layout/Renderings/Email Campaign/Speak/ObjectDetailListObserver” control to the page and then set its datasource to “/sitecore/system/Modules/SPEAK/EmailCampaign/Controls/List views/Custom ECM Reports/Clicks”

If you have any questions before I get this post fully updated, drop a note in the comments and I will get back to it ASAP.

Also if anyone has ideas for other reports, or wants to contribute to it, please reach out.