AEP & Google Part F: Google Analytics Reporting with RTCDP Audiences

Recap: What is a RTCDP Destination?

Destinations are pre-built integrations with external platforms that allow for the seamless activation of data from Adobe Experience Platform. You can use destinations to activate your known and unknown data fcor cross-channel marketing campaigns, email campaigns, targeted advertising, and many other use cases.

In practice, a Destination allows marketers to export and sync of audiences and/or customer attributes using a user-friendly UI. 

Google Analytics

So upfront, there isn’t a Google Analytics Destination. For the sake of completeness in the Google blog series, we will explore using a method that is worth having in your Real-time CDP (RTCDP) toolkit. RTCDP has an all-purpose Destination called “Custom Personalization” that can return the audience membership client-side.

Use case

As a digital analyst, I want to

• Gain insights or form hypotheses by reporting on audience membership data created centrally in Real-time CDP.
• Optimize multi-channel campaigns based on audience target or control.
• Optimize in-flight campaigns/content with RTCDP-defined audiences in Google Analytics’ real-time reports.

So what?

• Overlaying non-digital data often reveals deeper insights. Google Analytics may not have data from all data sources compared to RTCDP.
• RTCDP contains rich audiences such as modelled audiences (Customer AI, Look-a-likes)

Best Practices

• Work closely with the GA4 implementation team to assess if GA4 custom dimensions/audience are available.
• Consider the impact of this method on GA4 server calls licensing.
• Setup operating process for likely different teams involved.
• Maintain the “active” audiences conservatively to avoid any blotting of Audience IDs sent and managed in GA.

Preview:

Introduction

In order to use this method, the main prerequisite is for the Adobe Web SDK or Mobile SDK for mobile apps. The Audience IDs will be selectively returned client side via the RTCDP Destination mapping (sharing) process.

In the tag manager, the Web SDK response can be either stored or immediately trigger the data request to Google Analytics.

Tutorial

1. Prerequisites
2. Create New Custom Personalization Destination
3. Consume the Web SDK response from RTCDP
4. Pass Audience IDs to Google Analytics gtag
5. Create a Custom Dimension in GA4
6. Create GA4 Audiences corresponding to RTCDP
7. Google Analytics Reports with RTCDP Audiences

Prerequisites

• Use Adobe Web SDK/Mobile SDK to send data to RTCDP (to support streaming audiences).
• Adobe Data Collection Datastream is created and used in the same environment as the data collection. i.e. if you have split your Datastreams by environment or brand then will need multiple corresponding Destinations.
• Permissions/access to update client-side deployment either in the tag manager or front-end.
• User with the required RTCDP and Google Analytics permissions.

Create New Custom Personalization Destination

In Adobe RTCDP, create a new Custom Personalization Destination:

The key configurations is:

• Integration alias: “ga” is an example, we will use this label to filter against other Destinations.
• Datastream ID – this must match the environment where the data is collected.

Consume the Web SDK response from RTCDP

Using a website environment using Adobe Tags (manager), we can add a Rule to push the RTCDP audience membership to the GA4 tag.

Commonly, data collection requests are triggered with the Web SDK “Send Event” Action. There is a corresponding event “Send event complete” which allows access to the response.

Otherwise, the response can also be consumed as a promise.

Adobe Tags – consume via the “Send event complete” and a custom code Action.

In the custom code remember to filter by the “ga” alias, this is the same alias when the custom personalization destination was created above.

//Custom Code Action
_satellite.logger.info("+++ Push to GA4 +++ ");

var customDestination = event.destinations;

if (customDestination) {
  customDestination.forEach(item => {
    // Check if the alias is "ga", this alias is set in the RTCDP Destination
    if (item.alias === "ga") {
       _satellite.logger.info("+++ Custom Destination with alias 'ga' found +++ ");
      item.segments.forEach(segment => {
        gtag('event', 'rtcdp', {
          'audienceId': segment.id,
          'debug_mode': true
        });
        _satellite.logger.info("+  " + segment.id + "  +");
      });
    }
  });
}

Alloy.js version

alloy("sendEvent", {
  "xdm": {...}
  }
}).then(function(result) {
        if (result.destinations) { // Looking to see if the destination results are there
            result.destinations.forEach(item => {
                if (item.alias === "ga") {
                    item.segments.forEach(segment => {
                        gtag('event', 'rtcdp', {
                            'audienceId': segment.id,
                            'debug_mode': true
                        });
                    });
                }
            });
        }
    })
    .catch(function(error) {
        // Tracking the event failed.
    });

Pass Audience IDs to Google Analytics gtag

We used the Gtag library for simplicity as shown above. GA4 does not have an array data structure therefore Audience IDs are configured to be sent as separate events.

Alternatively, the audience IDs can be stored client-side and read by Google Tag Manager on the next GA event. 

Create a Custom Dimension in GA4

Create GA4 Audiences corresponding to RTCDP

Create audiences in the UI so that the audienceIds paramaters matches exactly to the RTCDP audience ID in the RTCDP UI. Note I am pretty sure that this could be automated via the API eventually.

Google Analytics Reports with RTCDP Audiences

After the GA4 Audience is created, it is available in the different reports below. The audienceId parameter can also be used to create Segments for specific comparison or other filtering.

Real-time Reports

Reports

Explore

Conclusion

In summary, AEP can support a variety of applications even if there isn’t an existing Destination. The Custom Personalization Destination enables for the Audience memberships to be consumed by any applications that can interact with the AEP Edge Network.