ActiveCampaign Email Marketing is a Power BI app that connects to your ActiveCampaign account and analyzes the performance of your campaigns. The app requires an active ActiveCampaign account and API Access Key to refresh automatically. The paid version can be purchased here.
You can explore the various pages on the left sidebar to analyze different aspects of your campaign, including a Campaign view, Tagged Contacts, Performance Analysis, Subject, Body & Link analysis, and Unsubscription analysis. The app enables an interactive view of crucial email marketing KPIs such as open rates, CTR (Clickthrough Rate), and CTOR (Click-to-Open Rate).
What’s New
- The free version of the app has refresh limits to allow you to evaluate the value of the app. To lift the refresh limits, you can subscribe to the paid version which will also allow you to gain the Power BI report file (.pbix). Subscribe here. The app is limited for one account. To monitor multiple accounts you can set the quantity to the number of accounts needed. You will still need to install multiple apps, or duplicate the Power BI report file per account. If you cancel the subscription, you will no longer be allowed to use the Power BI report file or any derivative work.
- Once you subscribe to the paid version, you will have two options to use the app. 1. As a Power BI app on the Power BI service, using your browser with limited edit options. 2. If you have advanced Power BI skills, you can edit the PBIX file and customize the report to meet your needs. Instructions on how to connect the Power BI report are here.
- 12 New tables: Automations, Contacts, Scores, Deals, Contact Score Values, Contact Field Values, Tracking Logs, Deal Field Meta, Deal Field Values, Deal Status, Stages, Pipelines
- New report pages for Automations, Contacts, Contact Scores and Deals
- Connect live to the dataset of this app from other Power BI reports and Excel worbooks, or export visuals’ data to Excel. This new functionality allows you to use the app dataset’s as a connector for ActiveCampaign, and build reports that combine ActiveCampaign data with other data sources using Composite models in Power BI
- Filter or slice and dice your report by specified contact lists, or navigate to the relevant contacts on ActiveCampaign portal
- New hyperlinks in the campaign tables, lists and deals allow you to navigate from Power BI into the external resource on the ActiveCampaign portal
The app is available to download on Microsoft AppSource here. Read the instructions below for more details.
Official App Partner
In February 2021, ActiveCampaign officially included the app in their portal here and we have become an official ActiveCampaign partner.
How to set up the Power BI App
Login to your Power BI account and install the app on Microsoft AppSource. When your new app is ready, click Go to App. You will also notice the new tile of ActiveCampaign Email Marketing on the Apps view.
On the app, you will notice the notification bar. Click Connect your data.
In the Connect to ActiveCampaign Email Marketing window, you will need to provide your account name and API Token.
How to find your Account Name on ActiveCampaign?
Go to your ActiveCampaign login page here (https://www.activecampaign.com/login). You would need to use the same account name that you use on this login page. Don’t provide a full URL that starts with https://, we only need the single-word account name.
How to find your Api Token on ActiveCampaign?
Login to your ActiveCampaign account. Select Settings, Developer, and copy the Key in the API Access section.
After entering your account name in the Account Name box and API Access Key in Api Token box, scroll down to enter the remaining parameters.
Additional Paramaters
Contact Modified Since — Enter a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD. This parameter will limit the refresh to include only data from recently active contacts. If you have a very large number of contacts and tags and get timeout errors when you refresh the dataset, it is recommended to enter a later date here and try again.
If you enter a date that is too recent, the refresh may fail since you have no recent data.
Campaign Sent Since — Enter a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD. This parameter will limit the refresh to include only data from recently sent campaigns. It is recommended to enter a later date if you have refresh timeouts, but you can first try only the Contact Modified Since parameter, which can limit the slowest tables in the dataset.
If you enter a date that is too recent, the refresh may fail since you have no recent data.
Include Deals – Enter TRUE or FALSE. When TRUE, Deals tables will be imported to the report. If you don’t use Deals in your account set this parameter to FALSE.
Is Demo – Enter TRUE or FALSE. When TRUE, all personal data will be masked.
Subscription Email — The free version of the app has refresh limits. Enter none, if you wish to run on the free version. With the free version, you can only refresh up to 3 months of recently sent campaigns, and 1 month of recently active contacts. To lift the refresh limitations, you can subscribe to the Premium version here, and enter your email address that was used during the subscription in the Subscription Email parameter.
Click Next.
In the next step, make sure that Authentication method is set to Anonymous and that the Privacy level setting for this data source is Organizational as shown in the screenshot below. Then, click Sign in and continue.
In the next step, make sure that Authentication method is set to Anonymous and that Privacy level setting for this data source is Organizational as shown in the screenshot below. Then, click Sign in and connect.
Note: The URL that is used here collects the Subscription Email parameter and Account Name to determine if you have the Premium subscription and unblock the refresh limitations. The app doesn’t send any other data to this URL, and your ActiveCampaign data and API Key remains within the boundaries of your organizational Power BI account. Only you and other members of the app’s workspace will have access to the API key.
You will see that the app Refresh is now in progress. Once the refresh completes you will see your account analysis instead of the sample data we used for demo purposes. You can explore the various pages on the left sidebar to analyze different aspects of your campaign.
The main page, Campaign Performance capture the main insights of your campaigns including Open Rates, CTR (Clickthrough Rate), and CTOR (Click-to-Open Rate).
The app provides interactive exploration capabilities including right-clicking on a campaign, selecting Drill through in the shortcut menu, and then clicking the Selected Campaign will navigate to the relevant campaign page.
In the drill-through page of the selected campaign, you can click the back arrow button on the top right corner to go back to the previous page. You can always go directly to the Campaign View page (third page on the left sidebar) and select your preferred campaign for analysis using the Filters on the right pane.
On the Tagged Contacts view, you can analyze your contacts by tags over time, and filter tags and contacts by a specified list.
The app includes the Performance Analysis page to analyze messages by their open rates, CTR and CTOR. Clicking on any box in the scatter charts (#1 in the screenshot) will show you the corresponding metrics for the relevant message on the top section that is highlighted below (#2).
Right-clicking on any box on the scatter charts, selecting Drill through in the shortcut menu, and then clicking Selected Campaign will navigate to the relevant campaign on a dedicated page.
The app includes the Subject, Body & Links page that shows you the impact of subject line length, message length, and the number of links on your campaigns.
Finally, on the Unsubscription Reasons page, you can analyze the main reasons your audience unsubscribe events over time and location and drill down to the main messages that led to it.
This app is managed on the Power BI as a Power BI Template App. To learn more about Power BI Template Apps and how you can manage them and share them with your audience, go here.
In your ActiveCampaign Email Marketing workspace, you can go to the dataset settings by clicking the ellipsis control as shown below to set the schedule refresh and change the parameters of the app. Learn here how to set schedule refresh in Power BI.
On the Settings page, you can edit the parameters that were explained above.
Note – Keep the Is Demo parameter as FALSE. If you change it to TRUE, the report will refresh your data but will mask all subject lines, email messages and use our demo screenshots.
Advanced Customization Scenarios
This section describes the advanced scenarios that are available in the new version of the app. We will start with the easiest customization option – Editing the report visuals using the browser. Then we will describe how to export data, build completely new reports and combine your ActiveCampaign data with other sources, and connect the data live to Excel without copying the data.
Edit the report
For light-weight editing of the report, you can go to Workspaces, and select the ActiveCampaign Email Marketing workspace, then select the report.
Click Edit, and modify the report. You can modify existing visuals, convert them to new visuals, modify fields, create new visuals in the existing page and create new pages.
When you complete the changes, select File and click Save.
Go back to the workspace and click Update app. This action will push the changes to the app consumers in your organization (To provide them permissions to access the app, you will find the Permissions tab after you click Update app. To read more about Power BI apps go here).
Export Data from a Visual
To manually export the data from an underlying visual of the ActiveCampaign app, click on the ellipsis on the top right corner of the visual.
Select Export data in the shortcut menu.
Click Export in the Export data dialog box.
Build a New Report & Combine Your Own Data
To use the ActiveCampaign app like a connector, and build your own reports that can also include additional data sources, open Power BI Desktop and select Get data drop-down menu. Then select Power BI datasets.
Select ActiveCampaign dataset and click Create.
You can now build your own report, by selecting the relevant fields from the tables on the Fields pane.
If you need to combine ActiveCampaign data with additional data sources, you can click the Get Data to import the other data. You will be prompted to change the connection to a DirectQuery. Click Add a local model and bring your other data into this report.
Connect the Dataset Live with Excel
You can use the Analyze in Excel feature in Power BI/Excel to connect live to the Power BI dataset. Learn more here.
Final Words
Contact us here if you subscribed to the premium version and have any questions. If you wish to cancel or manage your subscription, log in here to access the Stripe portal.
Special thanks to Daily Cookie who partnered with DataChant to build this app.
