How to Implement Custom Salesforce Marketing Cloud Reporting

When a business invests in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (whether that’s Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud Engagement, or Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition), the expectation is that better, higher-volume campaigns naturally equal better results.

However, even with strong campaigns and automation in place, many marketing managers and directors still face the same challenge: sitting down with the C-suite to justify spending, defend the roadmap, or request additional budget. And when all you have to hand are email opens, click-through rates, and Engagement Studio completion numbers, those conversations are difficult.

A key problem is that out-of-the-box Salesforce Marketing Cloud reporting simply doesn’t go deep enough to prove ROI. It’s helpful for campaign-level insights, but not for questions like:

• What’s actually creating pipeline?

• Which journeys influence closed revenue?

• What’s the real impact of our nurture strategy?

To answer these, teams need custom reporting, built on clean data, consistent tracking, and dashboards that link marketing activity directly to sales outcomes. This article walks through how to create that level of Salesforce Marketing Cloud reporting, in a way that’s practical, scalable, and shaped for real-world enterprise use.

Native Marketing Cloud reports are a good starting point, but they’re not designed around your specific business. This means they come with limitations that tend to fall into three areas.

1. They focus on activity, not impact

Most standard reports and dashboards focus on operational metrics:

• Sends

• Opens

• Clicks

• Unsubscribes

• Individual journey metrics

These are useful for campaign optimisation, but they don’t tell you whether a journey contributed to an opportunity, whether a webinar accelerated a deal, or whether a nurture series influenced revenue.

When the goal is to prove ROI, activity metrics only take you so far.

2. Attribution is limited or absent

Sales cycles are rarely linear. A prospect might:

• Download a guide

• Join a webinar

• Receive three nurture emails

• Visit a pricing page

• Respond to an ad

• Speak to sales (finally!)

Most Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports don’t account for this. Without the right multi-attribution, it’s almost impossible to show true influence across the buying journey.

3. Reporting varies by platform

Each Marketing Cloud product has different reporting structures:

• Account Engagement has strong campaign alignment but limited deep attribution without B2B Marketing Analytics.

• Marketing Cloud Engagement relies heavily on data views, SQL, and custom modelling.

• Advanced Edition offers more data flexibility via Data Cloud, but still needs a clear structure for accurate reporting.

The result is that marketers rely on a mixture of spreadsheets and screenshots to make their point.

Before you build custom dashboards, it’s worth defining what “good” actually means in the context of Marketing Cloud reporting. At a minimum, strong reporting should deliver:

Clear alignment between activity and revenue

If a campaign influences pipeline or helps accelerate deals, reporting should highlight that clearly. Good reporting contextualises engagement by showing what it meant in terms of real business impact.

Cross-channel, multi-touch attribution

Marketing campaigns don’t happen in isolation. They often involve multiple channels and a mix of paid and organic sources. A good reporting structure brings together:

• Email sends

• Journey interactions

• Landing page submissions

• Advertising

• Website behaviour

• CRM interactions

…in a way that’s consistent and meaningful.

Numbers you can rely on

Executives don’t need dozens of dashboards. They want dashboards that surface the right buying signals. Reporting must be clean, well-defined, and easy to interpret if budget conversations are to become straightforward.

Here’s how each Marketing Cloud product supports custom reporting, and where customisation is essential.

Account Engagement (Pardot)

Account Engagement integrates closely with Salesforce, which makes it ideal for CRM-aligned reporting. However, true ROI visibility often requires:

• B2B Marketing Analytics (Tableau) for attribution, influenced pipeline, and multi-touch models.

• Campaign alignment and campaign hierarchy.

• Consistent naming conventions and UTM tracking across assets.

Account Engagement can produce excellent ROI reporting when the underlying data structure is well-planned and maintained.

Marketing Cloud Engagement

Engagement’s standard dashboards are channel-led. To build strong, ROI-focused reporting, most teams rely on:

• Data views

• Automation Studio

• SQL queries

• Marketing Cloud Intelligence (Datorama)

• Marketing Cloud Connect and field mapping

These features can be extremely powerful, but they require more technical setup to produce cross-channel or revenue-focused reports.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition

Advanced Edition offers deeper analytics, more robust data management, and access to advanced personalisation at scale. For custom reporting, the real acceleration comes from pairing it with:

• Salesforce Data Cloud

• Marketing Cloud Intelligence

• Consistent tracking structure

This allows for genuinely enterprise-level attribution and customer journey analysis.

There are several tools you can use to build custom Marketing Cloud reporting, depending on your marketing automation platform and business needs.

• Salesforce Reports & Dashboards (best for CRM-aligned pipeline and revenue attribution)

• B2B Marketing Analytics (ideal for Account Engagement users)

• Marketing Cloud Intelligence (cross-channel and multi-platform analytics)

• Salesforce Data Cloud (customer unification and advanced attribution)

• Tableau, Looker, Power BI (business intelligence tools for enterprises needing deeper visualisation)

Most enterprise teams use a combination of these, depending on data complexity and reporting expectations.

The approach below aligns with the core principles of the MarCloud ROI Framework. We start with a strong setup, move into insights and execution, and then use reporting to refine and improve over time.

1. Foundations

Before dashboards, attribution models, or business intelligence tools, you need reliable data.

This includes:

• Clean contact and lead data

• Correct CRM integration

• Proper tracking for journeys, campaigns, and assets

• Consistent naming conventions

• Consistent UTM tagging

• Campaign data that passes cleanly from Marketing Cloud to Salesforce

If this foundation isn’t stable, reports will reflect structural and data issues rather than meaningful insights. Ensure your account has no hidden integration or implementation issues by running a complete Marketing Cloud audit.

2. Plan attribution models

Reporting is only effective when it’s built around the questions your stakeholders will ask, such as:

• Which campaigns influence qualified leads?

• What journeys correlate with higher win rates?

• Are we accelerating pipeline?

• Which channels reliably contribute to opportunities and revenue?

You need to plan your attribution model by first defining:

• Lifecycle stages

• Lead qualification rules

• Campaign hierarchy

• Attribution logic

3. Map your data

Once you know what you’re trying to measure, you need to map how each interaction moves through your systems. This includes:

• How Marketing Cloud syncs with Salesforce

• Which campaigns and journeys need to be tied to Salesforce Campaigns

• How Data Cloud or Intelligence will be used (if applicable)

• Where multi-touch attribution will be surfaced

• Which system acts as the source of truth for ROI reporting

This creates a clean, logical pathway for marketing activity to connect with revenue data.

4. Build your reports & dashboards

Only once you’ve got the technical foundations, insights and data readiness can you launch intelligent marketing campaigns. Once you’re up and running, you’re ready to build the reporting layer itself.

Most enterprise teams need at least the following dashboards:

Lead and contact quality dashboard

Shows how audiences progress through qualification criteria.

Campaign performance dashboard

Highlights key touchpoints and engagement signals across campaigns.

Journey performance dashboard

Combines engagement data with Salesforce outcomes.

Pipeline and revenue influence dashboard

Shows which journeys, emails, and campaigns supported deals.

Channel comparison dashboard

Helps identify which channels deliver the strongest returns.

For attribution, you may choose:

• First-touch: good for lead generation

• Last-touch: useful but often misleading

• Multi-touch: best for considered buying cycles

5. Validate and optimise

Once your reports and dashboards exist, it’s time to validate the analytics.

• Review dashboards with sales and leadership

• Check attribution accuracy

• Identify anomalies

• Set a reporting cadence (monthly, quarterly)

This is a crucial step in turning data into shared understanding and shared success. But beyond this, use the insights from dashboards to feed directly into campaign optimisation. You might:

• Refine journey steps

• Improve campaign segmentation

• Update UTMs or naming conventions

• Expand or reduce budget allocation

• Strengthen lead qualification criteria

• Adjust scoring and grading

• Introduce new content into high-performing journeys

It’s all about continuous improvement!

Setting up and maintaining custom Marketing Cloud reports requires:

• Clean data

• Platform knowledge

• CRM alignment

• Consistent tracking

• Understanding of attribution

• Familiarity with Marketing Cloud’s architecture (all platforms)

• An ability to spot where a reporting problem is actually a data problem

If any of these are missing or if reporting feels unreliable, take it as a sign to get expert help. Custom reporting pays for itself when it unlocks clarity, confidence, and better decisions.

Out-of-the-box Salesforce Marketing Cloud reporting provides a useful starting point, but enterprise-level reporting requires custom dashboards, clean data, consistent tracking, and a clear link between marketing activity and revenue.

When teams follow a structured approach, much like the one found in the MarCloud ROI Framework, reporting becomes a natural extension of execution. The result is improved visibility, more confident conversations with leadership, and smooth marketing operations.

Speak with MarCloud about specialist Marketing Cloud support. Our team of developers and consultants handles everything from integrations to attribution modelling so that you can focus on strategy and creativity.