SFMC GA360 Integration Benefits

Allow me to start by sharing an article from November 2017, where Google and Salesforce announced their partnership for a seamless integration between their products Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

SFMC GA360 integration

If you are wondering why I am sharing a 3 year old article please continue reading.

General information about the products and services we would be talking about further in this article:

• Google Analytics is a very popular digital analytics tool being used on the majority of the websites and mobile applications.
• Salesforce marketing cloud is one of the market leaders in the marketing automation domain, which allows digital marketers to manage their online campaigns effectively.
• Journey builder is a product available in SFMC for creating and activating multi channel campaigns for reaching out to customers.

For any journey that is activated, a default analytics dashboard is available for reporting in SFMC which gives basic statistics around:

1. Delivery rate
2. Open rate
3. Click rate
4. Unsubscribe rate

This is highlighted in the green box below:

Journey Analytics in SFMC

The section highlighted in the yellow box above suggests users to enable the GA360 integration to get deeper insights. This particular notification inspired me to write this article which details about the benefits achieved with the integration.

So if your organization or client is using both of these products in silos, then this is the direction you want to be moving in where you can link both of these products and understand the comprehensive view of the visitors arriving on the website from your journey campaigns.

Few of the prerequisites needed for the integration are:

1. Google Analytics 360 (premium account)
2. Journey Builder available in SFMC account
3. GA360 connector provisioned (paid feature)

Once the integration is configured and implemented in your production environment you can easily see all your major Google Analytics metrics and reports directly in your Salesforce marketing cloud journey analytics dashboard for each of the individual journeys for which the Google Analytics integration was enabled.

First Benefit:

Multiple tabs (highlighted by ‘powered by Google Analytics 360’) are enabled in the journey analytics dashboard post the successful integration.

Analytics post integration

1. Goals: Metrics around completions, conversions and abandonment rates.
2. Ecommerce: Metrics around revenues, transactions and order values.
3. Site Usage: Metrics around page visits, sessions, bounces.

Note: The reporting interface is highly configurable and intuitive with many sections enabled by just a few clicks.

These GA powered reports help us understand how effective our journey and communication with consumers has been in driving traffic and achieving the configured goals in GA.

Analyzing the GA reports directly in SFMC journey analytics dashboard helps us to attribute the goals and user interactions to a particular journey. This also helps in the budgeting and understanding the ROI of a particular campaign.

Second Benefit:

Use of GA audiences as an entry source in our journey builder campaigns. Entry source is our lists of customers maintained in the SFMC instance. This helps Journey Builder understand where the customers entering this journey will come from.

Journey builder in SFMC

Typically most journeys run on data extensions or data coming directly from SFDC or some kind of user database which has customer attributes, but with GA360 integration enabled we can effectively retarget the users exported from the audiences configured in the GA360 admin.

These audiences are nothing but segments of the users captured in GA360 who landed on the website from either the email or SMS sent to the user through our journey builder campaign communication. And they have achieved one or multiple goals on the website.

Goals can be like user registration, user filling a contact us form, user adding an item to the cart, user buying a product on the website. Depending on the objective of the website goals can be of varied nature. Sample screenshot given below:

Goals conversion seen in GA

Goals setting in GA

GA goals shown above are from the demo account available from GA.

Closing Thoughts:

To use the GA data effectively with your marketing campaign efforts and get the holistic view of the user activity, this integration is the way ahead.

Happy Integration !!!

Thank you for taking out the time to go through my article.