50 Data Cloud Consultant Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A new Data Cloud consultant needs to quickly validate that Data Cloud is available and correctly enabled in a production org before starting any ingestion work. What is the best first step?

A retail company is ingesting customer data from an SFTP file drop. The file contains new and changed records daily. The company wants Data Cloud to update existing records when the same customer appears again. Which ingestion approach best supports this requirement?

A consultant needs to explain what a Data Model Object (DMO) represents in Data Cloud. Which description is most accurate?

A company wants to respect customer consent when activating audiences. What is a recommended governance approach in Data Cloud?

An organization ingests CRM Contacts and eCommerce customers into Data Cloud. They want to create a single view of a person using email address and phone number as match keys, but only when the data has high confidence. Which configuration best meets the requirement?

A consultant mapped a source field called Customer_Email to Contact Point Email in a DMO, but the activation audience is missing many email addresses. In the source data, some values include leading/trailing spaces and inconsistent casing. What is the most likely fix?

A company wants to activate a Data Cloud segment into Salesforce Marketing Cloud for campaign targeting. Which requirement should the consultant validate first to avoid activation failures?

A consultant needs to design a model where a single Individual can have multiple email addresses and multiple phone numbers, and each contact point may have its own "Is Preferred" flag. Which modeling approach best aligns with Data Cloud best practices?

After enabling identity resolution, a company finds that some household members who share a landline phone number are being incorrectly unified into a single profile. They still want phone to help match when combined with other signals. What should the consultant do?

A global organization must comply with data minimization principles. They want to ensure only necessary attributes are available for activation to ad platforms while keeping richer data for analytics within Data Cloud. What is the best design approach?

A consultant is configuring Data Cloud and needs to allow a marketing analyst to create segments and activations but not change ingestion or identity resolution settings. What is the best approach?

A company ingests web events and wants to analyze event trends over time without storing every raw event indefinitely. Which modeling approach best supports this requirement?

A consultant created a segment based on Unified Individuals but the segment returns far fewer records than expected. The source data appears in Data Explorer. What is the most likely cause?

A retail company wants to ingest customer records from multiple systems. One system provides a globally unique Customer_ID, but other systems do not. What is the recommended way to model and use this in Data Cloud?

A company must ensure that when a customer opts out of email marketing in its consent system, Data Cloud segments and downstream activations honor that preference. What should the consultant recommend?

A consultant is designing an activation to push a segment to an external advertising platform. The business requires that only a hashed email identifier is sent, not raw PII. What is the best solution?

A company’s identity resolution rules are mistakenly merging different people who share a household email address. Which adjustment is most appropriate to reduce false positives?

A data engineer wants to bring in incremental updates from an SFTP drop where each file contains new and changed customer records. The ingestion should update existing records rather than create duplicates. What should be configured?

A consultant needs to integrate Data Cloud with Sales Cloud so sales reps can view unified profile attributes on Contact records. What is the recommended approach?

A healthcare organization must ensure that certain sensitive attributes (for example, diagnosis codes) are not available for segmentation or activation, while still allowing them to be stored for restricted analytics access. What is the best design?

A Data Cloud Consultant is asked to ensure that only a small group of analysts can view a sensitive data stream (e.g., employee compensation) inside Data Cloud, while other users can still access non-sensitive unified profiles. What is the best approach?

A customer wants to ingest product catalog data from an external system and use it for segmentation and activation. The data includes Product, Category, and Price. Which modeling approach is most appropriate?

A marketer needs to build a segment of customers who have purchased in the last 30 days and have opened at least one email in the last 14 days. Which Data Cloud capability should be used to create this audience based on behavioral and transaction data?

After ingesting data from an SFTP file drop, the consultant notices duplicate rows are being created on every load instead of updating existing records. The source file includes a stable unique identifier for each record. What should be adjusted to prevent duplicates?

A company ingests mobile app events and wants to calculate a daily metric: number of distinct active users per day. The metric must be available for segmentation and refreshed daily. What is the best approach?

A consultant activates a segment to Marketing Cloud, but the target system rejects the activation because a required field is missing for some profiles. The segment definition is correct. What should the consultant do first?

A new Data Cloud implementation needs to support multiple business units that want to share some data (e.g., global customers) while keeping other datasets separated (e.g., regional loyalty attributes). Which approach best supports this requirement?

A company uses identity resolution with matching on email and phone. They discover that family members sharing a household email are being incorrectly merged into one Unified Individual. What is the best adjustment to reduce false positives while maintaining match coverage?

A consultant needs to design consent management in Data Cloud so that downstream activations only include profiles with valid marketing consent per channel (Email vs SMS). The source systems provide consent records with effective dates and status. What is the recommended approach?

A retailer wants to activate audiences to an ad platform. They must minimize data shared and should not export raw PII. The ad platform supports hashed identifiers for matching. What should the consultant recommend?

A Data Cloud Consultant is asked to ensure only a small group of analysts can create and publish calculated insights, while other users can still view and use existing ones in segments. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A company is ingesting a daily customer export file. Some files include unexpected extra columns, causing ingestion failures. What is the recommended way to make the ingestion more resilient while preserving consistent mapping to the Data Model?

A marketer wants to build an audience of customers who purchased in the last 30 days AND have an active email consent. Where should the consultant recommend filtering for consent to ensure governance is consistently enforced during activation?

A Data Cloud ingestion is successfully loading records into a Data Lake Object, but no records appear in the related Data Model Object. What is the most likely cause?

A retailer wants to unify profiles across email and loyalty ID. Email is sometimes shared by family members, but loyalty ID is unique. Which matching strategy is most appropriate to reduce false positives in Identity Resolution?

A customer needs to send a segment from Data Cloud to a downstream system that only accepts a daily file drop. Which activation approach best fits this requirement?

After enabling Identity Resolution, a consultant notices fewer unified profiles than expected. Two key source systems use different formats for phone numbers (e.g., +1-415-555-1212 vs 4155551212). What should the consultant do to improve match rates without relaxing match rules too much?

A team created a segment based on a calculated insight that aggregates purchases. The segment returns zero results, but raw purchase data exists in the Data Model. What is the BEST troubleshooting step to perform first?

A financial services company must ensure that certain sensitive attributes (e.g., government ID) are never exposed to marketers in Data Cloud but still need to be stored for back-office matching. What is the best design approach?

A global brand wants a near-real-time experience where when a customer opts out on the website, downstream ad platforms should stop targeting them quickly. The website updates consent in a system that streams events to Data Cloud. Which architecture best supports this requirement while maintaining compliance?

A consultant is configuring Data Cloud for a new org. The admin wants to ensure only a small group can create and publish segments, while most users can only view activation results. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A customer ingests customer profile data from a CRM source and notices duplicate individuals because the CRM system reuses the same email across family members. Which match criteria change would best reduce false merges during identity resolution?

A company wants to ingest web clickstream events and analyze behavior by individual. The events arrive with a cookie ID, and later the user logs in providing an email address. What is the best practice to enable linking anonymous activity to known profiles over time?

A marketing team built a segment but it returns zero members. In the segment definition, they filter on a field that was recently added to the ingestion mapping. Data ingestion shows success. What is the most likely cause?

A customer needs to activate a segment to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a journey. They want near-real-time updates as segment membership changes, but can tolerate a small delay. Which activation approach is most appropriate?

A company must comply with data minimization requirements. They want to ensure only necessary fields are available for activation to an ad platform, while broader data remains available for analytics in Data Cloud. What is the best design?

A consultant is designing data modeling for a retail customer. Transactions include many line items per order, and analysts want to segment based on both order-level totals and product categories purchased. Which modeling approach best supports this requirement?

A segment is activated to a downstream system, but the destination receives only a subset of members. Data Cloud shows the segment has 50,000 members, but the destination received 10,000. No errors are reported. What is the most likely explanation?

A customer must support 'right to be forgotten' requests. They need to ensure that when a consumer requests deletion, Data Cloud stops using the data for segmentation and activation and also prevents re-ingestion from a connected source that still retains the record temporarily. What is the best approach?

A business user asks what a "Calculated Insight" is used for in Data Cloud. Which statement is most accurate?