Are you looking to integrate your Google Analytics and Marketing Cloud data? If your answer is yes then you are in the right place. You can connect Google Analytics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud easily through the Google Analytics 360 Integration for Marketing Cloud. It lets you keep track of your journey activity as well as analyze it through your Google Analytics account without any help from your technical team. Google’s endemic authentication can be employed to make a secure connection between your Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 accounts.
To use this integration, Google suggests its customers assign a master company account that will track all properties and views by following the steps demonstrated in this video.
Table of Contents
What is Google Analytics?
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Google Analytics is a popular tool from the house of google that provides many features to users to gain maximum insight from your data.
Google Analytics helps companies keep track of user details and advertising campaigns using a simple javascript plugin. It provides an excellent reporting dashboard and the ability to run various analyses on the user activity data. It even supports advanced machine learning capabilities and helps organizations to deploy this capability to make better decisions without having to know the concepts or implementation details of machine learning algorithms.
Google Analytics also makes raw user activity data available to the companies that want to run custom algorithms and reports. This requires the raw clickstream data to be loaded into the organization’s own data store.
Here are a few key benefits of Google Analytics:
- Track Online Traffic: Google Analytics allows you to track traffic from all sources since having an understanding of where your audience comes from is a crucial aspect of running a business online. Pinpointing different traffic sources and understanding why and how much traffic comes to your website allows you to track the gains of your strategies.
- Understanding User Behavior: The key advantage of having behavioral metrics is that it provides you valuable information on what pages get the most engagement and traction. By having a better understanding of User Behavior, you can change the way you can interact with your users in the most optimized way.
- Data Reports and Customization: Google Analytics allows you to customize dashboards, alerts, and reports to analyze data that can fit every company’s different needs. Google Analytics provides an extensive library of user-generated reports and dashboards that can help you make data-driven decisions to improve efficiency.
- Improved Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing: With Google Analytics, you can identify the best-performing pages of your website to gain insights on the type of content to invest in. Google Analytics allows you to improve the tracking of the success of your Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategy. By analyzing every part of your content strategy, you can create a stable and solid plan with clearly defined steps to reproduce successful pages.
- Easy to Find Your Target Audience: With the help of Google Analytics, you can easily define your target audience. The audience can then be used to optimize the content of your website along with its offerings to increase engagement. Thus, an engaged audience is one of the best ways to improve a website’s potential.
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What is Marketing Cloud?
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Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms. As you know, the cloud is playing a vital role for any business, so here you can use Salesforce on a cloud with minimal subscription fees.
Salesforce marketing cloud is the digital automation marketing platform that provides marketing analytics software and services. Salesforce marketing assists digital marketers to target the exact potential buyer or audience.
The Salesforce marketing cloud allows digital marketers to create and manage the marketing campaign with customers.
Key Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Some key features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud are as follows:
- Create and manage bi-directional communication with existing and upcoming potential customers.
- It allows you to collect and analyze the known and unknown customers’ profiles.
- You can measure, report, and analyze the performance of your product in the market, based on it – you can make a future market strategy.
Integrating Google Analytics and Marketing Cloud Accounts
Prerequisites to Google Analytics and Marketing Cloud Integration
- Administrator permissions for Marketing Cloud as well as Google Analytics 360 account and property.
- Generate a Google Analytics 360 tracking code, which you then have to add to your website’s pages.
- In order to be able to get the conversion data, you must enable e-commerce in your Google Analytics 360 account.
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The steps given below can be followed to configure the Google Analytics 360 integration with Marketing Cloud. Google’s endemic authentication can be employed to make a secure connection between your Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 accounts and also sets view permissions for your reports.
- Go to Setup and click on Apps, then click on Google Analytics Integration.
- Then extend the Data Access Setting section, and click on Link Account.
- Either choose or input the name of the Google Analytics 360 account and click on Next.
- You will then be prompted to enter your password, do that and click on Next.
A popup window will display the information that the Marketing Cloud will access. - In order to sanction Google’s request to access Marketing Cloud, click on Allow.
Note: If you wish to disconnect the account, click on Unlink Account.
Choose Google Analytics 360 Views
Make sure that the Journey Builder dashboards are filled with data. Choose the Google Analytics 360 properties and views that you want to access for any business unit in your Marketing Cloud account.
To do this, follow the given steps:
- Under Setup, go to Apps, and choose Google Analytics Integration.
- Extend the Integration segment and click on Select Views.
- Find the properties and views that you want in your Journey Builder dashboards and add them.
Properties and views will turn into checkmarks when they are chosen. - Click on Save.
- Finally, click on Update.
Edit Google Analytics 360 Views for a Business Unit
If you want to change the Google Analytics 360 properties and views to serve a business unit, you must follow the given steps:
- Under Setup, go to Apps and select Google Analytics Integration.
- Extend the Data Access Setting segment, and click on Edit Access.
- You can easily add or remove a view by selecting or deselecting it.
UTM Parameters
The Google Analytics 360 integration with Marketing Cloud also lets you keep track through certain UTM parameters. These UTM parameters are appended to the URL and help identify the marketing campaign that brings traffic to your website.
Note: The Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, Campaign Name, sfmc_activityID, and Campaign ID parameters are the only ones that are tracked for SMS activities. Campaign Term, Campaign Content, and Subscriber ID are not tracked.
| Campaign Source (utm_source) | This parameter helps you identify the source of web activity. |
| Campaign Medium (utm_medium) | This configurable parameter lets you understand which channels, such as email or SMS, drive the web activity. |
| Campaign Name (utm_campaign) | Use this configurable parameter to understand which specific product promotion or strategic campaign is being used. It has two options. Set per Message—It lets you enter a custom campaign name for every email activity in the Journey Builder Email Send Flow. Message Name—The campaign name inherits the name of the email sent. |
| Campaign Term (utm_term) | This is a necessary, non-configurable parameter that lets you analyze individual links within messages. This parameter is populated with link alias text associated with the content asset. |
| Campaign Content (utm_content) | This is a necessary, non-configurable parameter that lets you track the effectiveness of a Marketing Cloud content asset. This parameter is filled with the content asset ID that is attributed to the content asset. |
| Campaign ID (utm_id) | This is a necessary, non-configurable parameter that lets you link activity within a Marketing Cloud journey and is filled with the journey ID. This parameter is generated by the Marketing Cloud to link activity in Journey Builder. |
| Subscriber ID (sfmc_id) | This is a necessary, non-configurable parameter that is needed to create persistent user IDs for the Audience Activation feature. |
| Activity ID (sfmc_activityid) | This is a necessary, non-configurable parameter that is suffixed to every link in a journey for supported channels. When someone clicks on a link, this parameter is passed to and consumed by Google Analytics from the URL. The corresponding Google Analytics behavioural metrics are then reported for the specific activity in a journey. |
Configure Google Analytics 360 Integration User Permission
It is also necessary to provide the required permission to access Google Analytics 360 integration features to the users you select. This task requires administrator role permissions.
Note: Please log out of Marketing Cloud before you begin this task.
- Finish the steps to Assign a Role and Permissions to a Marketing Cloud User from the Users Screen.
- In Marketing Cloud Setup, click on Apps, then click on Google Analytics Integration.
- In order to provide view-only permissions to desired accounts, choose view only for the user’s properties and views.
Note: It is advised to allow edit permissions for administration, tracking, and audiences to the account administrators.
- Click on Save.
Conclusion
In this blog post, you have seen how to integrate Google Analytics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud data using the in-built integration. However, this process can be tedious and time-consuming.
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