07 Jul Leveraging Google Analytics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement
Introduction
We live in an online world and as we know our organization’s web site traffic is an important set of data when trying to engage with our email and SMS subscribers. Yet regardless of the industry so many organizations have not properly taken the time to leverage web and other channels together effectively in their marketing efforts.
The ability to weave together the web with email and SMS messaging is something your subscribers have come to expect. A seamless experience and purposeful personalized messaging is appreciated by most individuals these days. It is not perceived as creepy anymore as their experience level has increased and as marketers have learned to leverage the messaging in more impactful moments.
The Opportunity
If your organization leverages the paid version of GA4 called Google Analytics 360, you have access to unsampled data and the ability to create audiences with up-to-the-moment insight into customer behaviors that your marketing team can leverage. If you only leverage the free version of GA4 (sampled and restricted data) today but are interested in what is discussed in this post as part of the paid version you should consider the upgrade. Here is a Google article on some of the differences between the free and paid version.
In combination with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (SFMCE) you can leverage known web traffic (with SFMCE contacts) to build audiences based on any of the dimensions, metrics, or events tracked in Google Analytics.
These GA360 audiences can be hyper focused and be shared into SFMCE to be used as an email audience, SMS audience, and/or a journey builder journey entry source for omni-channel marketing experiences. Note, the features described in this blog post will require additional licensing from Salesforce to activate if you have not already.
Google Analytics 360 Audiences
So you want to create an audience of every one who has visited your donation page on your website for at least one minute within the last week but did not click that all important donate button that are email or SMS subscribers in SFMCE. Sounds super powerful and important right? This is a simple example of the power that integrating these platforms provides!
You can simply create this audience using Google and have it pushed to SFMCE daily to inject into a targeted journey or individual email. You could maybe offer them a compelling reason or reward you would not offer to everyone to get them to come back and make that critical donation since they were so close. You can even measure the journey performance / conversions in SFMCE too as mentioned later in this post.
The web activity based segmentation options are only limited by what you track (especially with the paid GA 360 version) and there are so many great examples out there such as:
– Remarketing – like the example above target individuals based on their web activity but not accomplishing the goal
– Interest Based Targeting – target groups of individuals based on their online interests
– Intent Audiences – Using individuals search terms/keywords create audiences of intent to target with aligned messaging via email or SMS
– Predictive Audiences – Use pre-built or custom generated Google predictive metrics in SFMCE for targeting ”likely to purchase/donate” individuals for example
– Action Based – Have key online activities/actions that mean something to your business that you want to take advantage of from an email/SMS marketing standpoint? There ya go.
SFMCE Journey Analytics Dashboards / Metrics
The GA4 integration enables the ability to view your SFMCE journeys performance against the goals you have set while seeing email and web performance in one spot. By leveraging the paid version (GA360) and enabling the e-commerce components you will also be able to review conversion and revenue tiles as well showing the web based revenue and conversions that could be attributed to the SFMCE journey.
Looking For More Integration Information?
Google Analytics Integration for Marketing Cloud Engagement from Salesforce Help
Google Analytics Integration FAQs from Salesforce Help
Conclusion
Integrating GA4 with SFMCE will take your email and SMS marketing game to the next level, opening up a new world of use cases and opportunities to become hyper targeted!
If you are interested in learning more please reach out to our team.