Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Email & Mobile API Connector

For more information about Marketing Cloud, click here.

The SFMC API pulls data from your Marketing Cloud instance via an S3 extract. If this is the first time Marketing Cloud Intelligence is requesting this data extract for your Marketing Cloud instance, you can pull data for 180 days back.

• Channel: Email Marketing
• Data Stream Type: Messaging
• Data Lagging: 1 Day

Prerequisites

• To connect to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud API, you need a valid username and password with Email Studio and API access.
• The user must have Enterprise-level access.
• The user must also be an Admin and Marketing Cloud Admin.
• This API connector supports the following account type:
  • Enterprise 1.0
  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Core or Connect

  The user must have access to the parent member otherwise the authentication will fail.

• If you want to access Journey Builder, MobileConnect, and MobilePush data make sure you have API access to the relevant features as well. If you don’t have the required access information or encounter any issues, contact your Marketing Cloud representative.

When setting up your permissions for Marketing Cloud, under Marketing Cloud Intelligence (Datorama), select the Enable Intelligence (Datorama) Integration checkbox.

General Setup

After entering your credentials, select the Enterprise and Members (also known as Business Units in Marketing Cloud) you want to retrieve data for. To retrieve the data for all Members, leave this field empty.

Extended Properties

• Time Zone - From the dropdown list, select the time zone you want to report daily data on. It’s highly recommended you set the same time zone that is used for Marketing Cloud Enterprise to avoid data discrepancies.
• Get Test Emails - Select this checkbox to retrieve test emails in addition to the existing data. To view the Dimensions and Measurements retrieved, see Email below.
• Get Journey Data - Select this checkbox to retrieve enriched Dimensions of Email and Mobile Push data in addition to the data retrieved by the API by default. To view the Dimensions and Measurements retrieved, see Journey below.
• Get MobileConnect Data - Select this checkbox to retrieve SMS data from MobileConnect, in addition to the Email data retrieved by the API by default. To view the Dimensions and Measurements retrieved, see MobileConnect below.
• Get MobilePush Data - Select this checkbox to retrieve push notification data from MobilePush, in addition to the Email data retrieved by the API by default. To view the Dimensions and Measurements retrieved, see MobilePush below.

Available Marketing Cloud Intelligence Measurements and Dimensions

The following tables display the available Measurement and Dimensions that will be mapped depending on the checkboxes you select in Extended Properties. By default, Marketing Cloud Intelligence automatically pulls Email data, if you want to also pull Journey Builder, MobileConnect, or MobilePush data, you must make sure you select the appropriate checkbox in Extended Properties (as described above).

Note For unmapped fields, check the relationship of the field and map accordingly. For example, if

email name

acts as an attribute for

message send key

, map as message send key attribute.

Email

Note While Unique Clicks, Unique Opens, and Unique Unsubscribes are mapped to Message Total Clicks, Message Total Opens, and Message Total Unsubscribes, they are the Unique Measurement values.

Mobile Connect

The following Measurements and Dimensions are retrieved when connecting to your Marketing Cloud account:

The following Dimensions and Measurements are also retrieved when selecting the Get MobileConnect Data checkbox in Extended Properties:

Journey

The following Dimensions are also be retrieved when selecting the Get Journey Data checkbox in Extended Properties:

MobilePush

The following Dimensions and Measurements will also be retrieved when selecting the Get MobilePush Data checkbox in Extended Properties:

Known Issues and Limitations

Email meta-data and engagement data, stored in the Marketing Cloud database is only accessible to third party apps, such as Marketing Cloud Intelligence through daily extracts. Marketing Cloud, exports the data to an Amazon S3 bucket on a daily basis. The Marketing Cloud Intelligence API then reads the data from the S3 bucket, aggregates it, and stores it on the Marketing Cloud Intelligence data model.

The data in the S3 bucket is deleted after 90 days (to comply with the GDPR regulations) the deletion causes some of the limitations listed below:

• First Time Creating a Data Stream - The first time you create a Data Stream with your Enterprise account, a background provisioning process takes place enabling your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account to access this data. This process could take a couple of hours to complete and can cause the Data Stream to fail during initial data retrieval with a specific error - Initial Retrieval Timeout. You can either reprocess your data stream manually after a few hours, or it will reprocess and fix itself the next day.
• Send Date Dimension - The Send Date dimension for triggered (by journey or API) emails will not be available if more than 90 days have passed since the original send date. For example, if you send out an email for a specific campaign on January 1, 2021, and it was opened or clicked on April 1 2021, the send date dimension will not be available, so any engagement data from that email campaign will not have a send date since 90 days have passed since the original send date (January 1, 2021). Note: This limitation doesn’t affect standard emails.
• Campaigns Dimension - There are several limitations to the campaign dimension as follows:
  • Engagement data for campaigns created over 90 days ago won’t have the campaign information.
  • In Marketing Cloud you can assign several campaigns, while in Marketing Cloud Intelligence the data model only allows for one campaign, if you assigned several campaigns Marketing Cloud Intelligence selects the first one.
  • If the campaign code changes after the first time it’s set, Marketing Cloud Intelligence won’t reflect those changes.
  • Campaign data won’t populate if the campaign is assigned to the email after the email was sent.
• MobileConnect Message Definition - Messages can be created more than 90 days before the message is sent, in a case like this, the message information attached to the measurements won’t be available. For example, the message information attached to the measurement, such as Message Name won’t be available.
• MobileConnect and Journey - Journey data is not pulled for MobileConnect data. All Journeys appears as 'Default Journey' or 'N/A'
• Geolocation - The geolocation is derived from the IP address. Consumer rights (GDPR) can block the reporting of the IP address, making the data you have on geolocation incomplete. Another common issue with the accuracy of geolocations is the use of VPNs and Proxy Servers that cause the IP address to be unreliable and inaccurate in determining the geolocation.
  

  Note Geolocation is only available for engagement metrics.
• Content with Special Characters - When files contain special characters (non-ASCII) for example Spanish or Japanese, any data that contains multiple lines, could fail during parsing. When using non-English characters it’s recommended to check the Disable Multiple Parsing and Enable non-ASCII parsing checkbox. This checkbox parses non-English characters but can’t parse multiline, so it only pulls the first line of each field.

How to QA Your Data

For Intelligence Reports for Engagement, complete the following steps:

• Go to the Marketing Cloud Report Builder.
• Navigate to: Analytics Builder > Marketing Cloud Intelligence Reports > Pivot Tables
• Compare the totals of specific emails between Marketing Cloud Intelligence and Intelligence Reports for Engagement.

Marketing Cloud Configuration Best Practices

For an optimal view of your Marketing Cloud Intelligence data, consider these best practices:

• Avoid special characters. Special characters and emoji in Marketing Cloud aren’t supported. They’re replaced with the replacement character
• Create a unique Campaign Code. The Campaign Code from Marketing Cloud will be mapped to Campaign Key in Marketing Cloud Intelligence and the key must be unique to ensure proper data aggregation
• After a Campaign Code is set, don’t change it. Campaign Code in MC is a freeform field that can be manually changed after it is entered. If the Campaign Code changes after the time its first set, the change won’t be reflected.
• Assign the Campaign Key and Name prior to sending the email. Campaign data doesn’t populate if the campaign is assigned to the email after it was sent
• Assign only one campaign per message. The Marketing Cloud Intelligence data model can only link one message to one Campaign Key.
• Because of the Campaign Name nuances, it’s best to leverage the Message Send Name for any naming convention.