At Salesforce Partner Silverbullet I had the opportunity to build a Data Cloud POC for an enterprise client. This involved ingesting Marketing Cloud Engagement data extensions, Personalisation Bundle streams, configuring data mapping, identity resolution, segments, and activations. In this article you’ll find real-world scenarios I encountered during development and technical solutions.
Connect
Is it possible to restrict the data coming in from a streaming Bundle?
This account consumes a large volume of data: 500 web and app events captured by the Personalisation sitemap every 12 seconds. There is a “Set Filter” option next to each MCP stream during set up. However, this filter applies at the Data Space level. It is not possible to curate or restrict the volume of data ingested by a streaming Bundle.
Data Cloud will ingest known MCP users who are active from the point of Bundle deployment. You can delete Personalisation streams after deployment, with the ability to add them back in the future if required.
Harmonise
Marketing Cloud Engagement data extension mapping
When considering identifiers used within a business, there are Salesforce Ids such as Subscriber Key, and company generated Ids. Add Company Ids as fields on the Individual DMO and use them to create relationships with other DMOs.
From a data mapping perspective however, the Individual Id for Marketing Cloud streaming or data extension sources must be Subscriber Key. There are a couple of reasons for this:
- In MCE streaming bundles the only Id field available to map is Subscriber Key. Custom attributes cannot be added to the MCE Starter Bundle streams
- Data Cloud sets the Individual Id value as Subscriber Key in Customer360 shared data extensions
If Individual Id is a company Id that’s not the same as Subscriber Key, this will cause problems in Marketing Cloud. Sending to a Data Cloud shared DE with an incorrect Subscriber Key will create duplicates in All Subscribers.
Ultimately there is an expectation in Data Cloud that Subscriber Key will be used in a particular way: as the Individual Id for Marketing Cloud data sources. You can also see this in action from the value of “Party Identification Name” in Marketing Cloud bundles: it is preset by Salesforce as “MC Subscriber Key”.
How do I change the mapping of Individual Id or Contact Point fields after Identity Resolution is running?
To remap fields you will need to clear all the dependencies for that DMO first.
The process to do this is relatively smooth if you are using (1) Source Priority as the reconciliation rule in Identity Resolution, and (2) you have at least two Profile category DLOs.
- Turn off auto runs in your Identity Resolution Ruleset
- Remove the source DLO you want to re-map from the Source Priority list in reconciliation rules
- Go to the Data Stream and click “Remove Mappings” on the object
- Re-map as required
- Add the source DLO back to the Source Priority list in reconciliation rules, then turn on auto runs
If you cannot remove mappings to a DMO, this may be because you have only one Profile DLO mapped to it. When a DMO has only one source in IR reconciliation rules, Data Cloud won’t allow the DMO’s mappings to be removed.
The workaround is to map this DMO to a second Profile category stream. For example, map Contact Point Phone from a data extension and the Personalisation users stream. Add the second Profile DLO to IR source priority reconciliation rules. Then you can delete the original DLO from IR so you can make changes to the mapping.
Unify
How do I customise the Unified Individual Profile page?
Go to Profile Explorer and select a profile. Click “Edit page” under Setup. You can include Individual fields, Contact Point Objects, and engagement activity using the provided components.
Individual records are not unifying
In data streams where Contact Points or Party Identification objects are mapped, make sure the value of the “Party” field in each object is the same as Individual Id in the stream.
Activate
I ran segment counts and Data Cloud is showing 0 segment members
If you have changed any data mappings, check the relationships on your DMOs. In this scenario, we updated Individual Id to be Subscriber Key. As a result, previous DMO relationships with N:1 or 1:1 on Individual Id could no longer find a match, resulting in 0 segment members.
To remove an incorrect relationship from a DMO that is used in a segment, you will first need to delete all the rules in that segment. Then you can delete the old relationship in the DMO, and add a new relationship. Following this, rebuild your segment rules.
I published a segment to Marketing Cloud Personalisation with my known MCP user, and Salesforce created a duplicate profile
The Data Cloud activation to MCP is an ETL feed which can be found in the MCP Feeds dashboard. Email address is included as an identity attribute out of the box in this activation. This should have found my existing user, however a duplicate user was created in MCP. To resolve this, in the activation settings add a second identifier along with a “preferred attribute name”. Preferred attribute names are required for any custom attributes you add to an MCP activation. A merge event occurred in MCP combining the duplicate with my original known profile.
