How to Migrate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to GA4

With the transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 complete for standard (i.e., Free) Google Analytics account users, we are seeing greater feature adoption, familiarization with the distinctive reporting and attribution behavior, and a much broader set of available integrations for standard account holders. 

Many of these integrations were Google Analytics 360 (GA360) only under the Universal Analytics account model, so unless you were paying for a GA360 license for your organization, you were missing out on many integration features. 

That is no longer the case with most of these enterprise linking and data export functions.

There are still plenty of good reasons to secure a GA360 license now that the transition to GA4 is done. Still, these mostly pertain to data limits, data freshness, and access to increased numbers of available measurement slots (event parameters, custom dimensions & metrics, goals/conversions, you are still likely to see plenty of sampling in your free account if you have high data volumes, and that alone can be a deciding factor.

Sampling kicks in at the 10 million event mark in a standard GA4 property, but in a 360 property, sampling does not apply until you hit the one billion event mark.

Below, I will briefly summarize the integrations and features available in a standard GA4 account that you may have thought were GA360-only features because of your experience in Universal Analytics. Let’s call these ‘net new’ GA4 standard integrations:

5 New GA4 Standard integrations

1. Display & Video 360 (DV360)
2. Campaign Manager 360 (CM360
3. Search Ads 360 (SA360)
4. Google Ad Manager (GAM360)
5. Big Query Export

This is a long introduction to get to the meat of this blog post. Still, we wanted you to be aware of a ton of integration functionality available to you in your standard GA4 property and to announce a new integration that went live on November 6: the GA4 audiences integration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). 

Like the live audience sharing you may already use for your linked Google Ads, SA360, and DV360 accounts, you can now share your GA4 audiences directly with your linked Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. Use those audiences in Journey Builder to drive customer engagement and nurturing journeys based on rich behavioral segmentation. This is a potentially powerful integration, and like many other GA4 features, it was a 360-only option under Universal Analytics.

There are a handful of requirements to utilize the GA4 to Marketing Cloud integration.

• Need to have a Marketing Cloud Enterprise 2.0 Account
• Must have purchased the Google Analytics Integration SKU with your Salesforce license (speak to your Salesforce Rep if you need to activate this)
• Link your GA4 and Marketing Cloud Accounts (must have dual Admin rights in both GA4 and SFMC)
• Configure Google Analytics tracking parameters in your SFMC account for both Web & App

Conclusion

Once Salesforce Marketing Cloud is successfully linked to your GA4 property, and once your SFMC links are properly tagged with the required utm parameters, you will be sending your SFMC subscriber ID into GA4 from your Marketing Cloud campaign traffic. 

This allows GA4 and SFMC to sync users and is the conduit for sharing those granular, highly targeted behavioral segments back to SFMC for use in SMS and email campaigns within Journey Builder.

Interested but confused where to begin? Reach out to us today. We’d be happy to help you get the Marketing Cloud or any other integrations fully configured and validated to step up your utilization of GA4. 

Want to understand where this feature fits into your larger digital maturity and digital transformation goals? Let’s start with a conversation and discover how we can work together.