Unfortunately not that I’m aware of, and the process for getting assistance went nowhere.
I created an ActiveCampaign support ticket asking the question above. They said they’d help, then got back to me saying that we need to contact our reseller. I knew the company I’m doing work for purchased ActiveCampaign through a reseller, but I didn’t know that they were supposed to be handling support requests on behalf of ActiveCampaign.
I contacted the reseller with the same question and forwarded the support ticket number. The reseller never got back to me, and neither did ActiveCampaign after that. It was entirely frustrating to get kicked over to an external company to answer a support question that ActiveCampaign either can’t, or refuses to. I’m going with the former. It seems like they rolled a partner company that resells their platform for them under a bus.
The problem is that the reporting feature wasn’t entirely built by ActiveCampaign. They connected their backend data to a Google Looker instance, which is why the reporting feature feels sandboxed from the rest of the platform- because it is. It’s also why when trying to do some work in custom reporting you may run into instances where you can enter LookML (Google’s Looker query language) to try and query data. In addition to that, the reporting that you actually do get out of it can’t be shared with other members of the organization due to this sandboxing.
As far as I can tell this was either implemented and not kept up to date, or not fully implemented in a way that makes the data queryable in a useful way. It seems to come down to ActiveCampaign support not being able to provide assistance in using the separate platform by Google that they chose to integrate with.
I am open to being corrected about this by an ActiveCampaign representative, but I’ve looked at how the reporting is set up in detail and being denied help by support and this is the conclusion I’ve come to.
My solution was to just write applications to query the API and analyze data from that, but I ran into issues where the API documentation was not correct or out of date. It’s also difficult to pull data without many many requests to their server. It’s not possible to get custom field data when you get a Deal record, so you have to get all of the Deal records, then query the custom field data for each record separately. In our case this means roughly 7,000 API calls and that takes at least an hour. I contacted support to verify that this was true, and they confirmed that it was the only way to get the data needed.
I’ve moved on from using the API wherever possible and now just export all of the Deal data in a given Pipeline to a giant CSV file and then write additional functionality into my application to parse and organize using that data for each specific use case.
This has worked for me but I’m a software engineer by trade and, frankly, I don’t think you should need to be one to do any of this.
Again- if ActiveCampaign wants to step in and correct me, that would be great for everyone.
