How to use Data Views in a marketing cloud?

What are Data views?

Marketing Cloud ‘Data view’ is a system-generated table or data extension (DE) that stores information about subscribers and how they have interacted with your content (sent via SFMC) over the past six months.

Some of the Data views used frequently

• _Open -? find email opens for your Marketing Cloud account.
• _Sent - find the subscribers sent emails from your Marketing Cloud account
• _ListSubscribers - find subscribers on lists in your Marketing Cloud account
• _Click -? view click data for emails from your Marketing Cloud account
• _Bounce -? view bounce data for emails from your Marketing Cloud account
• _smsmessagetracking -? find message tracking information from Marketing Cloud MobileConnect SMS sends

Reference

How to bring the Data view records to local data extensions?

Querying data view using SQL Activity in Automation Studio will enable us to fetch the ‘Data View’ table records to our? Marketing Cloud Data Extensions.

Steps to follow:

1. Create target data Extensions with required field names.
2. Create SQL activity in the automation studio, write SQL to fetch required field values from a single data view/ multiple data views as per requirements.
3. Run this SQL activity to get desired results in your target DE.

How to bring the Data view records to local data extensions?

Querying data view using SQL Activity in Automation Studio will enable us to fetch the ‘Data View’ table records to our? Marketing Cloud Data Extensions.

Steps to follow:

1. Create target data Extensions with required field names.
2. Create SQL activity in the automation studio, write SQL to fetch required field values from a single data view/ multiple data views as per requirements.
3. Run this SQL activity to get desired results in your target DE.

Consider an example to query “_Sent” Data view table:

Step1: Create a data extension with required fields

This DE will be referenced as target DE to save resultant Data.

The data types and actual field names to be used in SQL can be referenced from?salesforce help document

Step2: Create SQL?

In Automation studio > Activities > SQL, choose the target DE and data action type.

Step3: Create an Automation

Drag SQL activity to the canvas, choose the SQL activity created in the previous step and save.

?Step4: Run the Automation

In the case of large data it will take some time to complete.

Once it is complete, The resultant records will be saved in target Data Extension.

?Some use cases of Data views

1.The subscriber information in data views will help you segment your audience for future campaigns. It will also help you understand campaign performance and identify optimization opportunities.

2.During subscriber key reconciliation, you will need to take backup of subscriber data like their preferences and subscriptions status, using data views we can take backup of the records.