Marketing Cloud Deep Dive: Google Analytics 360 Integration

Announcer: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a Marketing Cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience- obsessed, and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful, one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- to's, and real- life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. I'm Bobby Tichy, along with Cole Fisher and Nick Burggraf. Today, we're going to jump into Google Analytics 360 and the integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, what it is, what it does, and how you can build it. It's really a simple integration if you've got everything that you need. And luckily, we've got our resident Google Analytics 360 expert, Nick Burggraf, with us here today. To say that Cole and I are not experts would be an understatement. So, Nick, thanks for joining us.

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Bobby Tichy: Since you're now taking over this podcast, from our last episode, I guess we should have let you do the intro. So, actually, why don't you to just do another intro right now?

Nick Burggraf: That's great. So, yeah. Nick Burggraf here inaudible to the Google Analytics connector to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Super excited about that. It's been a general release for a number of months now. But it really hasn't been widely adopted quite yet, because I think that there's an era of misunderstanding about the use of it and how useful it can be for the digital marketer, as well as really coordinating that effort with your SEO specialist who's in GA all day.

Cole Fisher: So, Nick, is part of that sort of slow adoption at this point, is part of that kind of the early- adopter curve? From what I hear, in my limited expanse of knowledge of GA 360 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration, what I understand is that it's the only productized integration that Google Analytics 360 offers. So, no platform has done this yet, no other products are using a native integration, and it's kind of the first of its kind, right?

Nick Burggraf: Yes. You're absolutely right about that, Cole. I think the interesting thing to point out here is that you have two giant companies, Google and Salesforce, and it's kind of an industry signal that these two are now collaborating on, really, data. So, you have Salesforce, which is, everybody knows the environment there as far as the CRM, and marketing, and go down the list of all their different clouds. And then you have Google, which is an ever- expansive data engine, as well as they're starting to do their own marketing cloud stuff. They're starting to do all kinds of dipping their toes in different technologies. But at the end of the day, it's Google. So, I think that this is a big indicator that that relationship will continue to grow because there's a market need for it. To your point, being the only productized integration, this should be a big win for anybody that's on Salesforce Marketing Cloud because you don't have any other options out there right now.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. It's funny that it's Salesforce and Google. I think to call these two companies innovative would almost be an understatement. So inaudible get into some of the how and why of what's available and some of the use cases and things like that which are already really exciting, but it's kind of mind- boggling to think of what could be as well in the future with the way these two types of companies tend to grow and kind of radicalized new product ideation and integration capabilities.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. And to make a comment on that, too, our last podcast was about release notes. So, I think that, again, this is one of those Salesforce forward- looking statement type things, but I think we can only see increased amounts of integration between GA and Salesforce.

Cole Fisher: Absolutely. So, Nick, hypothetically, if I'm looking to integrate GA 360 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, what, pray tell, would be my prerequisites?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. So, back to your point about early adoption and kind of the slowness to that, is that everybody's on GA. If you're in the e- comm space, you have GA. Now, what you don't necessarily have is GA 360. So, Google Analytics 360 is the above- and- beyond. It covers a lot more audiences, a lot more touchpoints. There's a lot of different product offering that is increased with GA 360, but that comes at a price of, I think the list price is$ 150K. So, not only do you have to have the integration from Salesforce, but you also have to have an actual GA 360 account. So, there's kind of two line items on your budget now, and that's probably a piece that plays into that slow adoption.

Cole Fisher: And, as a side note, GA 360 can actually be purchased through Salesforce. So, if you're a Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer but you don't actually have GA 360 at the moment, that can actually be purchased. And I think, actually, I may be stepping over the line here, I think they actually have a reseller sort of deal through Salesforce as well.

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. I'm sure they do. They thought of everything.

Bobby Tichy: So, yeah [inaudible 00:06:18].

Nick Burggraf: [inaudible 00:06:18].

Bobby Tichy: Oh, go ahead, Nick. Sorry.

Nick Burggraf: I was going to say, those are the only two real prerequisites as far as actually having something purchased in your hands, just so that you can actually do something with it. I think the other prerequisite is the people question as far as, you got to have somebody that knows GA, or that knows GA 360. Typically, that skillset is transferable. It's just having more options to do more stuff in GA 360, as well as having that marketing person, that digital marketer, that can take what's in GA and translate it through the integration into your Marketing Cloud.

Bobby Tichy: And if people kind of look at doing this for the first time, or they start to evaluate if this is going to be a good integration, because I think that there's kind of another component to this, too, is not only do you need the licensing on the GA 360 side as well as the Marketing Cloud licensing of Journey Builder, but you all actually have to buy a connector license, which is relatively low- cost considering the licensing between the two. But as someone's evaluating this, what are kind of the main use cases or features that people usually get out of GA 360 and the integration to Marketing Cloud?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. There's a ton of use cases. So, within GA, and if we take this a little step backwards, within GA, what you have the ability to do is create audiences. And this is really just based on a mixture of tagging and cooking within GA. So, if I have, just for example, any page on my site, I can look to collect people and push them into an audience based on certain behaviors. So, the typical ones we think about is browse abandonment and cart abandonment. We'll address those a little bit later. But any other kind of interaction as far as where they're at in the funnel, what they're doing, high- value customers or users on your sites or your platform, really, you can segment these people within GA in any kind of way you want to. So, this is where that SEO specialist really comes in to hyperdrive your audience creation, and then pushing those into your marketing platform, which is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to be able to put them down in Journey based on that specific behavior. And that's kind of the cool part about it.

Bobby Tichy: And as we kind of think about the savings kind of think about it as data integration, that sort of thing, I think that's one big element, too, where, not to be understated, that if we're trying to get e- comm or data warehouse data into Marketing Cloud, let's say it's a new implementation or something along those lines, this would be kind of a sure- fire way to do that pretty quickly, to get access to those audiences pretty quickly, granted that that raw data isn't and coming over. But inaudible at least be able to build the audiences for them to show the quick- win ROI and things along those lines. But also, there's no tech resource requirements to build this integration. It's pretty straightforward, which we'll get into here in just a minute. So, specifically within, so, you kind of talked about the SEO specialists, they're building out their audience in GA, and once that audience is created, what happens from there? How is it helpful to the marketer and Marketing Cloud? Where can we use it?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. So, once that audience is built, it can be published through that productized integration. So, again, once that's set up, which to your point, Bobby, it's pretty much plug- and- play. And we'll cover that, but as far as having that connection there, what will then happen is that marketer will go into Journey Builder and create a new journey with an entry source from the GA 360, there's a new icon, if you have that enabled in your account, that you can go in and select any one of those audiences based on their description and their key within Journey Builder, that entry piece. And then you can build out that entire journey. So, however that looks for that specific audience, you can build that Journey out to put that audience through that journey.

Bobby Tichy: Nice. And then as the audience is going through the journey, what are the nice elements or the features that folks can utilize? I think, specifically within the last release, there was even a nice update.

Nick Burggraf: Yeah, they had a few updates. Which one are you going to call out here?

Bobby Tichy: I was thinking mostly on the reporting side. So, being able to actually see commerce data from GA in the journey.

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. So, one thing we haven't mentioned yet is, not only is it the entry of an audience from GA into Journey Builder, but there's a dashboard associated to GA- specific audiences. So, if you think about Journey Builder, they have the Journey Dashboard so you can see open rates at a high level, your goal attainment or completion metrics, you can see all of those metrics. But GA also pushes over a lot of different data available to customize as far as how you want to see these dashboards and how you want those to look. So, from a high level, for your leadership teams or for your digital marketing managers, it's a great way to accumulate that data in one spot so you don't have to just say," Hey, here's our open rates and here's our audience" and looking at two disparate systems. A couple examples of those are just basic. So, you have your Marketing Cloud goals and open rates, but you have your Google Analytics goals, you have your email performance, which is native to what you've already seen within Journey Builder, you have your analytics usage, you have your analytics content tab. So, you can really get more granular and you can move these elements on the dashboard all around, so how you guys want to see it from a marketing perspective.

Bobby Tichy: And then once we actually kind of think about the setup for this, we mentioned a little bit earlier how easy it is to set up, but I would love to have you go through the actual, not full end- to- end, but how you actually set up the integration within Marketing Cloud.

Nick Burggraf: So, Bobby, as far as setting up the actual connector, it's twofold. So, if you have your single sign- on that you use from GA within Marketing Cloud, so once that productized integration is set up as far as a licensing perspective, you jump in there and sign in. And so there's a connection point that happens on the Marketing Cloud side. And then you actually go into GA and verify that, so there's kind of that dual- verification piece which is beneficial. And so verify that connection point within GA as far as a data integrator, and so you'll see an actual icon or you can search for it within the data integrations within GA, you can just select Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And then at that point, those systems are connected. Now, there's a caveat there, or the asterisk that I want to point out is that some marketers might think," Okay, great, now these systems are fully in sync. My audience here is in my audience here." That's not necessarily true quite yet. So, part of that set- up process is GA and Salesforce Marketing Cloud now start talking to each other. So, within the parameters that you set within your Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics starts to match those people over the course of sending history. So, what you're looking at is, you're going to actually have a 0% hit rate when you first set this up. And that number is quickly going to skyrocket as you continue to do your inaudible if you're already inaudible existing Marketing Cloud. Otherwise, if you're new to Marketing Cloud and you're starting to kind of do the inaudible ramp- up, that number will continue, that match rate will continue to grow.

Cole Fisher: So, it's not like implementing a new JavaScript where you're looking inaudible of users to a site, but you need them to hand- raise and self- identify. And that's, typically, when you implement a new JavaScript on a site, that's the really long hurdle where you want to wait 30, 60, 90 days of time to collect actual profile recognition, where the big hurdle is that recognizing where GA already recognizes these. So, it's once these two systems, Marketing Cloud and GA 360, are in communication, now it's just a matter of getting traffic to the site. So, once those hits occur, it's not about having to re- recognize profiles. So, it's a much quicker-

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. Exactly, Cole. That's a good way to put it, as far as you have your Marketing Cloud subscriber ID, and then you have your Google Analytics ID ascribed to those specific users, or those contacts, however you wanted to find that. And over the course of that time period, again, there's a little bit of a nebulous time period there, but those will get connected through that native integration and it will start pairing those people together.

Bobby Tichy: Well, thanks a ton, Nick, for taking us through that and being our resident GA 360 integration expert. Anything else you can think of that would be helpful?

Nick Burggraf: There's still a lot that goes into this. Again, it's a pretty simple connector and there's just a lot of use cases that a marketer can start to leverage. I think that the one thing I'd add or the one thing I'd reinforce, really, is it's twofold. One, it's having a greater connection to the analytics team, that SEO specialist for a marketer, which inherently has its work to start to kind of sync with that team. But the benefit of syncing with that team is that you're just so much more in- line with what's actually happening as far as from a traffic standpoint, from what's happening on your site, and you're not just shooting in the dark as a marketer as much anymore because you're really investing into a relationship with SEO.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. I think the interesting thing about this is, right now, and we talked about how it's Google and it's Salesforce and the potential for two crazy- innovative companies like that down the road is really quite fascinating, but I think for right now, even the use cases that we've discussed like cart and browse and product or form abandonment, post purchases, ratings, reviews, things like that, I think just even the most basic use cases right now that they're starting with are the ones that are really heavy needle- pushers. This really moves the needle in a big direction for a lot of companies. So, this is kind of that low- hanging fruit that makes a big impact across the board. No telling what it will be in the future, too, though.

Nick Burggraf: Well said, Cole.

Bobby Tichy: Moving on to the most important part of the podcast, completely unrelated, I feel like we should have some kind of intro music or something for" completely unrelated." Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. [inaudible 00: 18: 19 ].

Cole Fisher: What is that tune? That's from something. What was it? Where did you snake that?

Bobby Tichy: Oh, gosh. What is? Oh, man. Is it... I think it was the NBA on NBC.

Nick Burggraf: Yes, that's it.

Bobby Tichy: Back in the 90s.

Nick Burggraf: That's it.

Cole Fisher: Nice.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, man. Marv Albert. Reggie Miller. Those were good times.

Cole Fisher: Miller time.

Bobby Tichy: So, I'm going on vacation this week. It's my favorite vacation of the year. We go on an annual trip to Florida with my wife's sister and her husband and their three kids. And we really just don't do anything the whole week. We just hang out at the beach and we may rent a boat for a day or whatever. So, I was thinking, so that's what I look forward to almost all year, Cole, what's your favorite vacation, either that you've taken or that's recurring, or what's your favorite off- time thing to do?

Cole Fisher: I love a good vacation but I have a hard time taking real chunks of time out, just because I get terrible FOMO. But when I do vacation, I kind of vacation in the same manner that I do my everyday life. I don't really sit back and relax and not do anything. I want to pack it full of something fun to do here, and then here's a day of being on the beach, and this day will be... I want to make sure I'm doing everything, because again, that FOMO is, I don't know, it's just genetically dialed into me, I can't really do anything about it. But I would say I love a good ski trip or a mountain bike trip, but usually those are two or three days and they just physically exhaust you, where need a vacation from the vacation. But my favorite place low- key to go is actually also in Florida, it's Anna Maria Island. My aunt and uncle have a place down there on the beach and it's just gorgeous, overlooks the ocean, there's just tons of little seafood joints around, and it's kind of a golf cart- only island, mostly golf-

Bobby Tichy: Oh, those are the best.

Cole Fisher: It's just fantastic. It's kind of like you step back in time by 40 years. Some of the decor and the styles and homes and stuff like that, it's just super nice and relaxing, so you almost can't help but unwind there.

Bobby Tichy: We actually drive right by there, because we fly into Tampa and then we go down to Siesta Key which is in Sarasota.

Cole Fisher: Oh, yeah.

Bobby Tichy: So, it's actually, that's really close to where we stay.

Cole Fisher: I would highly recommend plotting a day and just going and perusing the island.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, yeah. It's less than an hour. Oh, man. We might have to do that.

Nick Burggraf: That doesn't really match up with your vacation schedule there, Bobby, of not doing anything.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, I know. I know. Well, it's funny, there is one thing that... So, there's this fruit farm that's I think 45 minutes away from where we stay. I don't really know why they call it a fruit... I guess because there's fruit that grows there, but I don't think I've ever seen it. But they'll take you on this little tour and they also have an exotic animal rescue. Last time we went there, there was a couple of alligators or crocodiles, whichever. I'm sure someone's going to correct me. Whatever crosstalk the area.

Nick Burggraf: Florida gators.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, there you go. And then they've got... What else did they have the last time? Oh, they had some skunks there and just kind of random stuff, but the best thing about this place, the only reason that we... We went one time, and we normally wouldn't go, they would go off on their own, my sister- in- law and her husband and three kids, but we went once, they have this incredible orange- flavored ice cream. So, last year, Joni and I, we didn't go on the tour or anything, we just hung out in the gift shop and we ate ice cream the entire time we were there.

Cole Fisher: Adventurous. Nick, what about you?

Nick Burggraf: Okay. So, as you guys know from the last episode, I'm from Minnesota. And obviously, we cross the border over to the Wisconsin Dells. Water parks. No, that's a joke. And inaudible probably offended part of the country. The wife is going to get mad at me for saying this because it was an accident. We've been to Hawaii twice together. So, the first time was for our honeymoon a couple of years ago. And then we had a one- year anniversary. At the time, we were pregnant, so it was like," Well this is our last time to do it before we have the baby." So, we went again and now it's becoming this," Oh, well, when are we go into Hawaii next?" Which, it's super expensive to go, but it's, I got to tell you, the Big Island Hawaii is the place to go. You always hear about Maui and Honolulu and Kauai. The Big Island is really cool because it has seven of the 11 different climate zones. So, you can go up the mountain and get some snow, you can go down south and get some arid, desert- y type stuff. But the snorkeling is really where it's at.

Cole Fisher: Very cool.

Bobby Tichy: Never gone snorkeling or been to Hawaii. But everyone tells me it's wonderful.

Cole Fisher: What do you do on vacations? My goodness.

Bobby Tichy: I know. I know. See, you have... So, I just recently, last week I heard this, I wanted to ask you, have you heard the phrase" JOMO"?

Cole Fisher: JOLO?

Bobby Tichy: No, JOMO.

Cole Fisher: JOMO, oh.

Bobby Tichy: It's the" joy of missing out" instead of the" fear of missing out." And I saw it on some show we were watching and I was like," Boy, that sounds like something that Cole would say, but would never be a fan of."

Cole Fisher: JOMO is definitely more your style of vacation, then.

Bobby Tichy: Definitely. Well, thanks again, Nick, for coming on and being our GA 360 expert. Really appreciate it. And just a reminder to everybody, if you have any questions or thoughts, you can email us at intheclouds @ levdigital. com. And we'll see you next time.