Use the Activation Center

Datorama is now Marketing Cloud Intelligence.

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain how the Activation Center works.
Create an action.
Create and trigger an action rule.

What is the Activation Center?

The Marketing Cloud Intelligence Activation Center gives you the ability to act on your data—ensuring your insights lead to real-time optimization, without wasting any time.

Using the Activation Center, you can connect your Marketing Cloud Intelligence data to many platforms, such as Slack, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Ads, and even create custom actions using Webhooks and Python. You can also automatically trigger actions based on your campaigns, media buys, and creatives, allowing for data-based optimization using clicks, not code.

The Activation Center has two sets of tools.

Actions: Configure a single action. For example, send a Slack message to your reporting channel, pause a campaign on Facebook, send a custom, dynamic email, and more.
Action Rules: Define a mechanism for triggering the actions you create. You can trigger multiple actions with one action rule.

Both tools are designed to free up your time for other critical tasks. Let’s get started!

Create an Action

In this module, we assume you are a Marketing Cloud Intelligence user with the proper permissions to create actions and action rules. If you’re not, that’s OK. Read along to learn how you would take the steps in a production org. Don’t try to follow these steps in your Trailhead Playground. Marketing Cloud Intelligence isn’t available in the Trailhead Playground.

Let’s take a look at how you can use the Activation Center to set up an automatic alert. In this example, the alert will be sent to an internal group of stakeholders whenever selected campaigns exceed their Cost Per Click (CPC) threshold.

To create an action in Marketing Cloud Intelligence, navigate to the Analyze & Act tab, and click Activation Center. Select Actions and then click Create New. A list of all the available actions is displayed. Each action has a slightly different configuration. In this example, we use the email action, so let’s select Email.

Datorama platform with the Actions tab highlighted and the Email action highlighted

The email action configuration screen is divided into categories to help you set up your action.

Start with defining the action.

Create new email action screen with name, destination, and content highlighted

Name the action using a meaningful name, so you can recognize it easily (1). Set the recipients for the email alert (2). Enter the email’s subject (3) and enter the text for the body of the email (4).

In the body of your email, you can make a dynamic query from your data that can include the dimensions and measurements entered in the query section. Simply use the curly brackets {} and select the relevant field to include in your email.

Next on the configuration page is Query Settings.
Create new email action screen with Query settings expanded and highlighted

In Query settings, add the relevant dimensions (1) and measurements (2) you’d like to include in your email alert. In this example, we add Day, Campaign Name, and CPC. Dimensions and measurements provide the relevant context for this alert for your stakeholders. You can also choose an entity to sort by (3), change the sorting method, and define how many results you want to retrieve (4). Lastly, define how to display the results (5).

After you define your action, click Create Action to save the action.

Create an Action Rule

Once you’ve created an action, you need to define what conditions will trigger the action—called the action rule. Here’s how.

In Marketing Cloud Intelligence, select the Analyze & Act tab, then click Activation Center. Select Action Rules and then click Create New.

A form opens for you to define the action rule.

Create new action rule screen numbered

Begin by naming the action rule with a meaningful name (1), and then select the action you just created (2). Define whether you want the action triggered by time or by event (3). In this example, we set the action to be triggered by an event, which is every time the CPC exceeds $0.50. Lastly, set the frequency (4), which is how often you want to check for the condition. Let’s set it to every morning, at 9:00 AM.

The last section allows you to add filters to your rule as needed. For example, select specific campaigns to track and even set a KPI threshold.

When you’re done, click Create Action Rule.

Trigger Action Rules Manually

Need to trigger an action rule manually? There are several ways to do this. First, on the Action Rules management screen, click on the rule you want to trigger and then click Run.

Action Rule screen highlighting a rule and the Run button

Alternatively, you can trigger action rules from widgets.

Dashboard page is open showing how to trigger an action by hovering over the data within the widget and clicking the action icon

From your widget, hover over the data (1), and from the dimension, hover over the options menu. Click the Action icon (2), and then select the action you want to trigger (3).

Sum It Up

As you can see, the Activation Center offers the tools you need to trigger actions based on your campaigns, media buys, and creatives. Your job just got easier.