Types of Data Targets in Data Cloud (Activations vs. Data Actions)

In Salesforce Data Cloud, there are two broad ways to activate your data. While working with Data Cloud’s numerous concepts and capabilities, activation is what you will have been leading up to. There would be no point in going through the ingesting, modeling, mapping, reconciliation, and transformation to only have the perfected segment sit in Data Cloud.  

The two ways to activate your data are activations and data actions. This guide will compare the two, and demystify when you should use each one.

Data Cloud Activation: Key Terms

• Activation: This is the process of sending these ‘golden records’ to a destination where they can be used for highly personalized interactions.
• Activation target: The configuration determining the location where a segment’s data is being sent during activation.
• Data action: The configuration determining how/when an alert or an event is sent to trigger an automation or data integration.
• Data action target: The configuration determining where an alert or an event is sent to trigger an automation or data integration. You need to set up a data action target to make data actions happen.

Activations vs. Data Actions

Activation Targets: The Facts

The four types of activation targets are: 

• File Storage: To push segments to Amazon S3, SFTP, Google Cloud Storage (GCS), and Microsoft Azure blob storage.
• External Activation: An external platform can have multiple activation targets, but you can only attach one activation target to an external platform account. For example, you may have multiple Google Ads accounts in your organization, so that’s one activation target per Google Ads account.

• Marketing Cloud: To push segments to Marketing Cloud business units. When creating, you can select which BUs should be included using arrows between two columns (like a multi-select picklist field). After you create and activate segments, view them in Contact Builder. A subfolder (Customer 360 Segments) is created when you publish your first activation. Be aware of activating segments to business units – contacts that will arrive in the shared data extension will be dependent on whether they are already present in that business unit. This means that you may find discrepancies between the original segment, and the activated segment according to the business unit. To avoid discrepancies, the advice here is to isolate the activation target to a single business unit.

• Data Cloud: To publish to other Salesforce apps, e.g. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud. You can create only one activation target for Salesforce.

Activation Targets are automatically created for each Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio) account and B2C Commerce instance connected to Data Cloud.

When deleted, the connection between all segments using the activation target will be severed. You can choose to disable/enable activation targets for temporary reasons.

Data Actions: The Facts 

• Send an alert or an event to a target based on streaming insights and engagement data.
• Triggers an automation (i.e. Flow) or data integration (e.g. MuleSoft Anypoint, other SaaS applications). 
• Supported targets are Salesforce platform event, webhook, and Marketing Cloud.
• Create a data action target first, then you will be able to set up the data action. 

Summary 

With Salesforce Data Cloud, the two ways to activate your data are activations and data actions. You should now understand how these both work, and which you should use in certain circumstances to be able to utilize the ‘golden record’ that Data Cloud has created.