AEP & Google Part C: Google Analytics and Google Ads Enhanced Conversions

In this post, we will review all the integration points of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Event Forwarding to Google Analytics and Google Ads Enhanced Conversions.

Previous blogs are:

1. Link to Part A: Data Collection: Google Tag Manager
2. Link to Part B: Google Cloud Platform

We are going to cover the two Google endpoints above. However, this AEP service is not limited to Google. Other popular endpoints are:

• Meta Conversion API (ex-Facebook)
• AWS
• Azure
• Pega

Use case

As an enterprise, the data collection for your Adobe applications is set up via the AEP platform edge server. You want to leverage a single data stream to be forwarded to Adobe and non-Adobe applications.

So what?

The marketing/advertising team are using Google Analytics and Google Ads as their behavioural analytics and paid search/YouTube advertising channel respectively.

• Site performance – this architecture will decrease the code required to run on the customer’s browser and decrease the page load time metrics
• Centralise all outbound external data streams from multiple sources such as website, mobile apps, server API e.g. connected TV, in-store customer events, internet of things etc

1. Google Analytics & Adobe Experience Platform

There is an existing Google Analytics – Universal Analytics (GA) Extension however this does not support the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) version. This Extension allows you to map your Data Elements (variables) to the GA parameters.

Avoid if

• Google Analytics is your only end-point
  • Sending data to GA UA/GA4 with Adobe Event Forwarding would be viable if the data collection is primarily for multiple Adobe applications
• GA4 has limited technical resources available to create and maintain this integration compared to using the client-side tag manager method
• there may be GA product limitations as a server-side only implementation e.g. Google Analytics Audience sharing to Google Ads/Youtube

How

• With the sunset of GA Universal Analytics, all effort will go toward migration to GA4. One of the options is to make use of the Cloud Connector extension to configure the payload to GA4 endpoints. This is a flexible extension that is similar to having Postman in the cloud.

2. Google Ads Enhanced Conversions & Adobe Experience Platform

Google encourages sending conversions through this server-side API to decrease the interference of ad-blockers and browser restrictions. The benefit is reported to be in the average range of 3 to 12%

The AEP Event Forwarding has an Extension to facilitate the server-side authentication and hashing of customer data to Google Ads.

Tips

• Run a cost-benefit analysis between the current state of the data collection and the requirements to collect additional data for this Google Ads endpoint
• Fully understand the functionality and limits of the Extension
• Monitor Google Ads updates to pre-empt any changes for the use of the Extention or its configuration

Conclusion

Event Forwarding is a flexible feature built on Adobe Experience Platform. As an open platform, vendors or customers can build their own Extensions to forward data to advertising or any API endpoint.

Centralising your Adobe data collection to the AEP Platform Edge network and your outbound forwarding in this feature is a worthwhile investment. As the number of data collection channels increase, this feature will assist in scaling the data collection for these new channels without creating and maintaining unique integrations per device/channel type.

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash