Google Analytics Integration with SAP Marketing Cloud

Update: With 1902 release of SAP Marketing Cloud, the integration with Google Analytics is enhanced; and an integration with Google BigQuery for datasets imported with Google Marketing Platform Analytics 360 is newly provided. With 1908 release of SAP Marketing Cloud, by setting up the SAP Outbound ID as a custom dimension in Google Analytics, it can be used to track email campaign receivers’ website visit behavior. Please refer to this well written article from my colleagues for more detail.

Context

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet, based on BuiltWith research, Google Analytics is used by 65% of the 10,000 most popular websites ordered by popularity; 74% of the top 100,000 popular websites.

Scenario

With the Google Analytics integration customers of SAP Marketing Cloud 1705 release can attribute web business documents like web shop sales orders or travel bookings to campaigns. With that the campaign success data can also include last touch conversions captured via Google Analytics.

How to Use It

The integration with Google Analytics loads conversion data from Google Analytics into SAP Marketing Cloud that add the campaign information to previously loaded business document interactions like web shop sales orders or travel bookings.

These are the steps that need to be followed:

1. Business documents (e.g. sales orders) need to be loaded into SAP Marketing Cloud. The documents must have a unique ID (e.g. order ID) which is also captured by Google Analytics. See more details on this in the prerequisites section.
2. Google Analytics must be set up and the event that is relevant for the campaign conversion must be captured. E.g. the successful checkout page must capture the sales order. See more details on this in the prerequisites section.
3. The technical integration needs to be set up. See more details on this in the prerequisites section.
4. Campaign parameters must be passed to Google Analytics. This is done by adding parameters to the urls that are contained in all marketing messages / links / pictures etc. See this blog for more details on adding these parameters to email messages: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/03/29/multiple-url-parameters-in-email-templates-in-sap-hybris-marketing-cloud/ Note: the url parameter utm_campaign must be the campaign ID of SAP Marketing Cloud as this is used to attach further campaign related information. Only the campaign ID is unique on SAP Marketing side while the same campaign name might be used for many different campaigns.
5. Load Google Analytics data into Marketing to enrich business documents:

a. Log on as Marketing Administrator and open the app.

b. To create and schedule a job based on delivered job template ‘Interactions: Enrich Sales Orders with Google Analytic’.

The following parameters are used to retrieve data from Google Analytics. It is recommend that you use the Google Analytics Query Explorer to verify these parameters before you scheduling the job in SAP Marketing Cloud.

• View ID: Enter the ID of the view from Google Analytics that you are retrieving data from.
• Start Date and End Date: Enter the date range for which you want to retrieve data from. It is recommended that you run the job on daily basis; you also need to make sure sales orders are imported into SAP Marketing Cloud before the enrichment.
• Metrics: Regardless of the metric, its value isn’t used in the job execution logic. It is simply used to fulfill the requirement that at least one metric is needed for a Google Analytics query.
• Dimensions:Choose the dimensions on which to base the report. The default dimensions are transactionId,campaign, adwordsCampaignID and deviceCategory.
• Filters: Optionally, choose filters from Google Analytics to filter the results you get from Google Analytics.
• Interaction Type: By default SALES_ORDER is selected; for other interaction type, the number of orders and the order amount will not be displayed on the Performance tab for a campaign.

What’s the Result – Out of Box

Out of box, after the job regularly running, you can do the following:

1. View the source campaign of the sales order from the Interactions facet of a contact.
2. Build a target group that only includes contacts who made purchases resulting from a specific campaign.

What’s the Result – With Extensibility

You can easily achieve more with the flexibility and extensibility provided by SAP Marketing Cloud.

1. You can enrich a business document interaction with other Google Analytics reporting dimensions besides source campaign and device category by doing the following:
   • Your administrator extends the structure of the interaction root with extension fields.
   • The customer namespace for the extended fields should be prefixed with GA_. For example,GA_CHANNELGROUPING. The system generates a field YY1_GA_CHANNELGROUPING_MIA in SAP Marketing Cloud.
   • You add channelGrouping as a dimensions parameter in the report, and the job execution logic fills the corresponding value.
2. You can report on sales volume with reference to campaigns by creating custom CDS view. To do so, please follow the steps which are well described in this Blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/04/06/how-to-report-on-interactions-for-sales-orders-with-reference-to-campaigns/.
3. You can run email campaigns which send out emails with UTM parameters for Google Analytics. To do so, please follow the steps which are well described in this Blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/03/29/multiple-url-parameters-in-email-templates-in-sap-hybris-marketing-cloud/.

Prerequisites

1. The business document interactions must be imported into SAP Marketing Cloud before the enrichment.
   • The communication medium of sales order or travel booking interactions must be BUSINESS_DOCUMENT. For more information about creating and changing interactions using the OData service CUAN_BUSINESS_DOCUMENT_IMP_SRV, see the Data Management Upload Interfaces Guide on http://help.sap.com/mkt Integration > Data Management > Upload Interfaces Guide > Introduction
2. Your web shop must be connected with Google Analytics, and standard e-commerce or enhanced e-commerce tracking must be implemented. For example, your e-commerce transaction information must be sent to your Google Analytics account.
   • If you are using Google Tag Manager, see the Ecommerce Tracking Setup Guide
   • If you are using analytics.js library, see the Ecommerce Tracking and Enhanced Ecommerce guides on the Google Analytics developer support Web site https://developers.google.com/analytics/
   • To verify the result, you can go to https://analytics.google.com/ and create the following custom report:

   Save and run the custom report which shall return some results:

3. The integration between your SAP Marketing Cloud system and your Google Analytics account must be set up. For more information, see the Integration with SAP Marketing Cloud – Google Analytics and SAP Cloud Platform Integration guide on http://help.sap.com/mkt under Integration.
4. Assign any external campaigns to the corresponding campaigns in SAP Marketing Cloud.

Architecture of integration

On SAP Marketing Cloud the integration scenario SAP_COM_0079 describes the setup in more detail.

See how it is embedded into SAP Marketing Cloud: