Challenge
Are there any Best Practices or Solution Kits that give a guideline for BU setup for global Marketing Cloud setups, where Sales/Service Cloud and Commerce Cloud are involved? The specific challenge I'm facing is that the desired operative structure where marketers should work in (country/region based) doesn't match the Commerce Cloud sites (continent based).
Furthermore, the Commerce Cloud sites have the Collect Code in place, that is used for cart/browse abandonment and product recommendations and therefore has to be connected to a specific Business Unit in Marketing Cloud.
Setup Summary
Involved Salesforce Clouds
- Sales/Service Cloud (one instance used globally)
- Marketing Cloud (one instance used globally, structured in multiple BUs (parent BU, another BU layer (business structure), [if approach 2 is used another layer for commerce sites], country/region BUs)
- Commerce Cloud (one site per continent)
Further Setup Information
Einstein browse/cart abandonment and product recommendations from B2C Commerce. Einstein Campaigns/Journeys should be managed on the second BU layer, so not within the country BUs.
Possible Solutions
So I'm wondering which approach is the best mainly regarding scalability and performance:
- Consolidate Einstein Implementations in one BU higher up the hierarchy (for all Commerce Cloud sites)
A. done in parent BU
B. done in the layer below parent and above country-BUs - Add another BU layer that matches the Commerce Cloud sites and implement cart/browse abandonment and collect code tracking on that added layer.
- ?
Hierarchy diagram of Solution 1
Hierarchy diagram of Solution 2
Open Questions
BU Structure
Regarding BU structure nothing specific is mentioned either, just that different business units should be considered if you have different inventory for the same products (speaks for approach 2).
The Marketing Cloud documentation regarding Business Units doesn't give any guidelines that take the cross cloud scenario into account and just mentions that it is an organizational structure meant to fit the "business needs":
Organize the hierarchical structure of business units to match your business needs. Business units can mirror workflow processes, demographic and behavioral data about your subscribers, or your organization's operational structure.
(Source: Business Units in Marketing Cloud)
Performance
Are there any performance benchmarks/considerations available? Is performance an issue here and therefore approach 2 the better option?
The Cross Cloud Solution Kit doesn’t give much information on the performance, except that delta files should be used for more than one million SKUs.
Data pool for recommendations
Considering the accuracy of recommendations there are two main factors that come to my mind:
- Data pool for recommendations is a lot bigger with approach 1
- Smaller data pools with approach 2 could also be beneficial if there is different behaviour in different markets