Maintain Your Marketing Cloud Administrator Certification for Winter ’24

Learning Objectives

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

Download history and storage details for automations and data extensions.
Streamline setup and enhance performance with Package Manager.
Use the latest Journey Builder improvements to optimize Journeys.
Improve security in multi-org Data Extensions.

Salesforce Certification

If you hold the Marketing Cloud Administrator credential, keep in mind that you need to complete this module by the due date to maintain your certification. Another important part of maintaining your credential is ensuring your Trailhead and Webassessor accounts are linked.

Interested in learning more about getting certified? Check out the Marketing Cloud Administrator credential.

Note: While anyone can earn this badge, this module is designed for those who hold the Marketing Cloud Administrator certification.

Protect the Integrity of Your Certification

The quality of our certification exams and the value our credentials provide are our highest priority. Protecting the security and confidentiality of our exams is essential to providing our customers with credentials that are respected and industry-leading.

As a participant of the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to accept the terms of the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement. Please review the Salesforce certification exam-taking policies in the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct Trailhead Help article for more details.

Salesforce introduced a ton of great feature enhancements over the past year. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones.

Download History and Storage Details for Automations and Data Extensions

Analyze automation health with automation history downloads in CSV files. Monitor marketing data usage by downloading extension storage details as a CSV file. Administrators can use reports to perform detailed data analysis or grant another user access to reports.

Download Automation History Details

Evaluate your automations over time by downloading your automation history as a CSV file. Improve automation health by reviewing each automation’s success rate and identifying automations with high skip or error counts.

Who: This report is available to the MC Administrator role. To make this report available to another role, grant the Automation Studio | General | Access permission in all business units in the tenant.

How: From your top-level Enterprise 2.0 account, go to Setup and click Download Automation History.

Download Data Extension Storage Details

View your marketing data usage by downloading your data extension storage details as a CSV file. Optimize your storage usage, improve performance, and ensure compliance by removing unneeded data and updating retention policies. System data extensions are now included in the download, but their storage usage is unavailable because it doesn’t count against your storage limit.

To optimize data extension storage, you can delete old data or define specific retention policies for each data extension. Old data is recognizable if names include terms such as “backup,” “archive,” “test,” “copy,” or an old date. Retention policies limit the time data is stored; for instance, saving triggered send data extensions for only seven days.

Who: This report is available to MC Administrator and Administrator roles. To make this report available to another role, grant the Administration | Account | Download Data Extension Storage Details permission in all business units in the tenant.

How: From your top-level Enterprise 2.0 account, go to Setup and click Download Storage Details.

Do More with Package Manager and Templates

Marketing Cloud Package Manager

Scale your best practices and reduce time to value by bundling company or industry-specific solutions and deploying them across environments with Marketing Cloud Package Manager.

Salesforce has introduced upgrades, enhancements, and improved deployment options for Package Manager in the past year.

Package Manager Updates

Marketing Cloud Package Manager now supports packaging and deploying automations that contain import activities that use subscriber lists. Include more images in a packaged solution by configuring them as a reference URL instead of storing them as individual items in the packaged solution. Use the new progress bar to see how much time remains for a deployment to complete. You can now use shared data extensions when packaging items, and users with Journey Builder access can now package journey templates in Package Manager.

Package Manager Enhancements

Marketing Cloud Package Manager automatically includes in-app messages when you package a journey. Package Manager also includes in your package any content referenced by the ContentBlockByName AMPscript function. We improved package deployment performance when you create and update attribute groups and attribute sets.

Package Manager Industry Solutions Templates

Industry Solutions are campaign templates that include industry-specific journeys, content, automations, landing pages, and more to help marketers work faster. Streamline your Marketing Cloud setup time or manage multiple instances for different business units.

Available solutions include:

Auto Account Onboarding
Auto End of Lease Re-Engagement
Auto Service Reminder
Retail Abandoned Cart
Retail Post Purchase
Retail Re-Engagement

How: To launch the solution deploy flow in Package Manager, select the Industry Solutions tab. Then select the appropriate solution and click Deploy.

Use the Latest Journey Builder Improvements

Download Journey Builder History via REST API

Marketing Cloud developers can download up to 30 days of journey history by business unit using REST API to a CSV or TSV file. Download data about journeys, activities, status, errors, and more to help with troubleshooting, segmentation, and reporting.

Optimize Journey Performance with the System Optimization Dashboard

Optimize the performance of your journeys in your business unit with the new System Optimization Dashboard. This dashboard includes journeys and configurations that can affect overall system processing speed.

View Journeys by Salesforce Data Entry Object

If you’re a Marketing Cloud Connect customer that uses Salesforce data entry in your journeys, you can identify and act on journeys that are close to meeting the Apex limit of journeys per object. On the Journeys Dashboard, select filters to see all journeys that use a Salesforce Data Entry event. Apply a subfilter to see journeys within a specific standard or custom object.

Simplify Journeys with Enhanced Exit and Goal Criteria

You can now use Journey data and Contact data together as part of Exit and Goal criteria instead of using unnecessary Decision Splits. Compare dataset attributes and streamline use cases, such as monitoring whether a contact’s status or lifetime value has changed since entering the journey.

View the Salesforce Activity Configuration in Activated Journeys

View the configuration of each Salesforce activity in an activated journey by clicking the activity. To investigate data or configuration mismatches inline, you no longer have to create another version of the journey.

Review Even More Configuration Warnings to Create Better Journeys

As part of journey validation functionality, Journey Builder proactively surfaces warnings about configurations that can impact your journey. These warnings now also include recommendations for Decision Splits, Wait Activities, and more. Use the warnings to help you achieve maximum scale and performance. These warnings don't prevent you from activating your journey.

View Best Practices While Configuring Journeys

While you use Journey Builder to build your journeys, you can learn more about configuration best practices. During journey building, you can now connect to Help documentation to review and troubleshoot.

Improve Security in Multi-Org Data Extensions

Improve organization security when using a multi-org account configuration. AMPscript and Query Activities are restricted to only access data from Synchronized Data Extensions that are related to the same connected app user. This ensures that each business unit can only access the data that is visible to them in the Data Extensions tab in Contact Builder.

Prevent unauthorized access to data from other business units or unauthorized data sharing across the enterprise account.

Restricted AMPscript Usage

AMPscript is restricted to the Synchronized Data Extensions that are related to the same connected app user. This ensures that AMPscript access to data for personalization in each business unit is the same as the Synchronized Data Extension that’s visible in the Data Extensions tab in Contact Builder for that business unit.

How: To prepare, make sure that you’re using Synchronized Data Extensions that belong to the integration that uses the same connected app user when using AMPscript.

Restricted Query Activity

Query Activity is restricted to the Synchronized Data Extensions that are related to the same connected app user. This ensures that queries for each business unit access only the data in Synchronized Data Extensions that’s visible in the Data Extensions tab in Contact Builder for that business unit.

How: Use the Synchronized Data Extensions that belong to the integration that uses the same connected app user when using Query Activities.