Set Up Analytics 360 Audience Activation for Marketing Cloud Engagement

Learning Objectives

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

• Explain how to enable Marketing Cloud Engagement as a destination for Google Analytics 360 audiences.
  
• Configure the product link within Analytics 360.
  
• Create an audience in Analytics 360 and share to Marketing Cloud Engagement.
  

Engage Customers Based on Their Behavior

To this point, you’ve successfully granted permission for Analytics 360 data to appear in Marketing Cloud Engagement, configured your account and link tagging setup, applied it to your journeys, and started seeing the Journey Analytics dashboard populated with rich cross-channel analytics. 

But what if you could go beyond just looking back and analyzing data for insights and start to take real, actionable steps to engage (or reengage) your customers based on their behavior?

Through the power of the same Google Analytics 360 Integration for Marketing Cloud Engagement, you have the ability to create audiences in Analytics 360 from the wealth of web, app, and advertising engagement activity you’re already collecting. This allows you to power journey interactions like email or SMS campaigns in the same way that you power advertising within Google’s ad products.

Before You Begin

There are a few prerequisites before you can get started with enabling this feature. Ensure that you have:

• Authenticated your Analytics 360 account with your Marketing Cloud Engagement instance.
  
• Properly configured your accounts, properties, and views.
  
• Configured your UTM parameters so they are properly recognized by Analytics 360.
  
• Turned on tracking for your journey emails.
  

It is important and necessary to complete these steps in order to enable audience sharing from Analytics 360 and to connect Marketing Cloud Engagement subscriber IDs with Analytics 360 client IDs.

This connection occurs when a known Marketing Cloud Engagement subscriber clicks a link in a message sent from Marketing Cloud Engagement. Analytics 360 recognizes the SubscriberID inside the link and ties it to the Analytics 360 client ID. From this point forward, any of the subscriber’s online activity such as abandon cart, goal non-completes, page exits, browse abandons, or search abandons can be used to share audiences between Analytics 360 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement or in reporting.

Add Marketing Cloud Engagement As an Audience Destination

You may have heard the saying, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” In our case, the journey—or rather Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud Engagement—is the destination.

The first step to enable Analytics 360 Audience Activation is to add Marketing Cloud Engagement as an activation channel or destination. 

To do so, you must authenticate your Marketing Cloud Engagement account from Analytics 360. Follow these steps:

1. In Google Analytics 360, click the Admin button.
   
2. Navigate to the Product Linking section and click Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement.
   
3. Click +Create Link.
   
4. Provide the information for your Marketing Cloud Engagement account and follow Google’s instructions to complete the authentication.
   
5. Give your link a name.
   
6. Click Done.
   

Create a Google Analytics 360 Audience

Now that you’ve authenticated Marketing Cloud Engagement as a destination, the fun really begins. Using any of the data measured by Analytics 360 of users’ activities on your web and app properties or ad campaigns (with the exception of demographic data), you can create audiences to market to through Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Follow these steps to create a Google Analytics 360 audience:

1. In Google Analytics 360, click the Admin button.
   
2. Scroll to find Audience Definitions below the Product Linking section.
   
3. Click to expand Audience Definitions.
   
4. Click Audiences.
   
5. Click +New Audience.
   
6. Select the criteria to add subscribers to the audience.
   
7. Enter a name for the audience.
   
8. Click Next Step.
   
9. Click +Add destinations.
   
10. Click to expand Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement.
    
11. Check the box next to the Marketing Cloud Engagement account to use.
    
12. Click Ok. (A confirmation will appear)
    
13. Click Publish. (The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement icon appears in the Type column in the audience list.)
    

Simple, right?

But you may be asking, what kind of audiences should I target now that I can reach them with email, SMS, and more? Here are some examples to get you started.

• Recapture browse abandoners: Send an email to customers who visited several product/service pages but abandoned the pages without purchase or conversion.
  
• Recapture goal abandoners: Send visitors who failed to complete and submit a form-fill page a reminder email to return and complete it.
  
• Engage influencers: Encourage customers who made a purchase in the past 90 days to submit a review.
  
• Target high-potential converters: Contact customers identified by Google as likely to buy ( Smart List) with email, mobile, ads, and so on.
  
• Connect visitors with helpful resources: Send a follow-up email to visitors who have browsed help pages and include common FAQs, tutorials, or even create a case with your service team to follow up.
  

Resources

• External Site: Google Analytics Support Documentation—Accounts, Properties, Views
  
• Salesforce Help: Configure Integration Parameters
  
• Salesforce Help: UTM Parameters
  
• Salesforce Help:  Enable Google Analytics 360 Tracking
  
• External Site: Google Analytics Support Documentation — Create and Edit Audiences
  
• External Site: Google Analytics Support Documentation — Smart Lists
  
• Salesforce Help: GA360 Audience Activation
  
• External Site: Google Feature Brief on Analytics 360 Audiences