Explore the Analytics 360 Audience Activation Capabilities for Marketing Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Validate audiences shared from Analytics 360 in Marketing Cloud.
- Use Analytics 360 audiences to start a journey in Journey Builder.
- Explain how a marketer can use the audience in a real-life scenario.
This unit is available for anyone to take; however, to use this integration, you must be a Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer with Journey Builder enabled in your account and be a Google Analytics 360 customer.
Way to go! You successfully published your Analytics 360 audience to Marketing Cloud. But get ready, because the journey isn’t over. In fact, it is just about to begin.
Accessing Your Analytics 360 Audiences in Marketing Cloud
Let’s start by finding out where those audiences ended up.
- In Marketing Cloud, open the Contact Builder app under the Audience Builder menu.
- Navigate to the Data Sources tab.
- Click the Synchronized button.
- Under the Synchronized External Audiences find the Google Analytics 360 audience card.
- Click View.
- Toggle on Sharing for any of the sub-business units you wish to make the audience available to.
- In the popup, check the box next to each business unit you want to enable sharing for, or check the box to Share to all Business Units.
- Click Done.
Marketers, Start Your Journeys
Now that you’ve enabled the correct access to your Analytics 360 audiences, let’s actually use them to do some marketing! To do so, we’ll use Journey Builder—our multi-channel marketing campaign orchestration and automation tool.
To make things easier, we’ve created a dedicated Google Analytics 360 Entry Source that lets you access your Analytics 360 audiences directly.
Here’s how it works:
- Drag the Google Analytics 360 Entry Source onto the canvas.
- Click Select an Audience.
- Click Select next to the audience to admit.
- To further refine your audience, configure any necessary filters using Marketing Cloud data and complete setup.
- Click Summary.
- Complete the rest of your journey, validate, then click Activate.
Putting It Into Practice: Meet Annie Lytics
Annie is a marketer at Northern Trail Outfitters, a fictitious outdoor gear retailer. Like they do at many businesses, user reviews provide an important source of peer validation during the purchase cycle.
As part of the customer journey, Annie has been tasked with increasing the number of reviews submitted for a new, high performance tent that’s just been released.
Finding Her Audience of Potential Reviewers
To encourage reviews, Annie wants to create a journey that reaches customers who made a purchase on the NTO website but didn’t leave a review. She’ll entice them with a small discount in exchange for their review.
To start, Annie adds the Product Checkout criteria to her audience to find all users who purchased the “NTO High Performance Tent” with a look back period of 30 days. Then she uses a custom dimension NTO measure called Reviews and excludes anyone who has already left one. She names her audience “Recent Purchasers (No Review)” then adds Marketing Cloud as a destination.
Reengaging Past Purchasers in Marketing Cloud
To entice customers to complete a review, Annie wants to directly email customers with the reminder and discount.
In Journey Builder, Annie simply drags the Google Analytics 360 Entry Source into the journey.
She configures the Google Analytics 360 Entry Source, selecting her Recent Purchasers (No Review) audience from Analytics 360.
At this point, Annie could use additional data stored within Marketing Cloud to add as filters for this audience. For instance, she could use Service Cloud data synced to Marketing Cloud to check if there was an issue with the order or even a return. By adding filters, Annie can ensure that the message is truly relevant for recipients.
With the audience and filters configured, Annie can now create the journey steps and add the appropriate messaging activities to the journey canvas.
And upon activation, members of the Recent Purchasers (No Review) audience that meet filter criteria are admitted to the journey.
In this example, Annie used the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 to go beyond the point of purchase and built a stronger relationship with her customers. At the same time, she also achieved a major goal for her organization: collect customer feedback for valuable insights. Like Annie, you’ll also find unique opportunities for smarter customer engagement with this powerful integration.
